Progress in the lin­ux 2.6.x compatibility

Since my call for test­ing the extend­ed lin­ux­u­la­tor in FreeBSD-current we got not much neg­a­tive respons­es. Ping does­n’t work on the lin­ux side (fixed in p4), ordi­nary net­work con­nec­tions (e.g. down­load­ing some stuff) works fine. There seems to be a dead­lock on SMP sys­tems when com­pil­ing a lot of stuff in par­al­lel (e.g. using emerge in a gentoo-chroot with MAKEFLAGS=-j4), this is being under inves­ti­ga­tion by Roman. Com­pil­ing stuff seri­al­ly on an UP sys­tem works just fine so far.

I’m won­der­ing if the lack of respons­es means that every­thing is run­ning just fine, or that nobody is giv­ing it a try. So far the dai­ly use of lin­ux pro­grams (acrore­ad, linux-firefox, …) with 2.6.16 com­pat­i­bil­i­ty seems to just work fine on UP and SMP sys­tems and cur­rent­ly I don’t see a rea­son to not switch the default in i386 in a week.

Jung-uk Kim is work­ing on the linux-TLS on amd64 part. ATM he is chas­ing bugs. It looks we can get fea­ture par­i­ty between i386/linux and amd64/linux32 soon.

Intron did send in a patch for the linux-aio stuff. Now I just need to get time to have a look at it.

Upcom­ming sound stuff

Ryan got per­mis­sion to extend the work he did in the SoC as part of a class at uni­ver­si­ty. He wants to push down the new mix­er stuff to the dri­ver lev­el now. He does it in the emu10kx dri­ver (because he has such a card) and maybe in anoth­er dri­ver. This will allow to use a lot more of the fea­tures a card offers. Yuriy (author of the emu10kx dri­ver) has some work in the dri­ver sched­uled too, so I offered him a p4 account so that they can col­lab­o­rate. As of this writ­ting it is up to the p4 admins to grant an account.

And while I’m at it: Kon­stan­tin (env24* dri­ver author) got his p4 account already. He tries to get some time to com­mit his work in progress there.

Sta­tus of the RealPlay­er stuff

Shaun had some unre­lat­ed soft­ware prob­lems so he was­n’t able to do the paper­work request­ed by Real. Those prob­lems seem to be fixed and he expects to get some time to do the paper­work “soon”. Real is look­ing for­ward to this as the FreeB­SD build is much bet­ter now.