I com­mit­ted the stuff from the sound project just a few min­utes ago. So the SoC 2006 has offi­cially ended for me (I just wait for the T-Shirt now… ).

This doesn’t mean I don’t care about the stuff any­more. I will com­mit fixes in case prob­lems show up and I’m also respon­si­ble in case my ex-mentees have ques­tions or patches. It’s just that the offi­cial part is done now.

Happy bughunt­ing to all.

I com­mit­ted most of Romans work in the lin­ux­o­la­tor to cur­rent. The new syscalls aren’t used until you run

sysctl com­pat.linux.osrelease=2.6.16

to switch back (after exit­ing all linux pro­grams) you just have to run

sysctl compat.linux.osrelease=2.4.2

But you have to do this on i386. Amd64 sup­port is not com­plete (and besides this, amd64 is still bro­ken and nobody pro­vided the nec­ces­sary debug­ging info to jhb@).

There are some known prob­lems with osrelease=2.6.16, e.g., prob­lems with futexes (vis­i­ble in acroread, realplay and skype), but some pro­grams already run with­out obvi­ous prob­lems (linux–fire­fox, linux-opera).

Any reports about new prob­lems to netchild@ and rdivacky@ please. Reviews, debug­ging info and patches are wel­come too.

A happy wel­come to Boris Samorodov to the ports com­mit­ters team (I’m his men­tor). This means I don’t have the bur­den to take care of the lin­ux­o­la­tor infra­struc­ture in the Ports Col­lec­tion alone any­more. Yeah!

Today I com­mit­ted another part of Roman’s work in the lin­ux­o­la­tor SoC. Now we should get log mes­sages for the new miss­ing syscalls for real. We defin­i­tively need high level overview doc­u­ments for sub­sys­tems.

I just removed the COMPAT_43 option from the GENERIC ker­nel in cur­rent. This may result in increased per­for­mance for some work­loads.

In the last days I also “men­tored” a lit­tle bit my SoC stu­dents. Review­ing some changes, sug­gest­ing some imrove­ments, com­mit­ting some stuff which is ready, dis­cussing var­i­ous things and so on.

And last but not least, I hope that the last bugs in the update to the new linux base port are ironed out on the ports build clus­ter (I did some com­mits in the last days).

The last week has seen some bikesheds. One of them was my com­mit of the doxy­gen infra­struc­ture for the ker­nel sub­sys­tems. Some peo­ple don’t like the way doxy­gen requires some markup tags in the com­ments, some peo­ple don’t think such API docs pro­vide addi­tional value and some peo­ple fear that 3^rd party devel­op­ers may use some func­tions which shouldn’t be used. I don’t repeat the counter-arguments of myself and other peo­ple here, but there are peo­ple out there which already make use of the cur­rent unsat­is­fac­tory doxy­gen out­put and are happy about this infra­struc­ture. Luck­ily is was super­seeded by another bikeshed (and gnn@ wants to work on doc­u­ment­ing a sub­sys­tem to show the ben­e­fits to those peo­ple which do not think yet, that this is a good idea). On a related issue, I’m wait­ing on a repo copy of src/sys/doc to src/tools (it’s one of two repo copies I’m wait­ing for, ncvs@ seems to be bussy ATM). Some doc@ peo­ple think it is more appro­pri­ate there.

The FC4 linux base port and the xorg based linux X11 libs port are sched­uled for test­ing in an exper­i­men­tal ports build run, we may see the switch of the default linux base port in the not so dis­tant future. It seems Boris is work­ing on updates to the rest of the lin­ux­o­la­tor infra­struc­ture in the Ports Col­lec­tion (gtk, …), so we may see a lot of updates there after the switch of the default linux base port.

In the last days I also helped/talked with my SoC stu­dents. Roman is play­ing a lit­tle bit with an amd64 tin­der­box he got access to and as a result he com­mit­ted sup­port for build­ing the lin­ux­o­la­tor on amd64 as a mod­ule to per­force (call for testers: he did send a patch to emulation@, please give it a try if you own an amd64 box). Ryan is cat­a­loging the IOCTL’s and their sta­tus (imple­mented, obso­lete, …) in the FreeBSD wiki. I already pri­or­ized those he did so far, and gave some sug­ges­tions how to pro­ceed with the impor­tant ones. This way he hasn’t to wait for me or Ariff when he is fin­ished with the cat­a­loging (being a men­tor liv­ing in a dif­fer­ent time zone means you should be ahead of your stu­dent… being ahead even before he is able to asks ques­tions is … a boost for your own ego ).