SoC 2006 fin­ished (sound project committed)

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.

lin­ux­o­la­tor SoC work committed

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.

lin­ux­o­la­tor day

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.

COMPAT_43, SoC and stuff

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).

Bikesheds, FC4 and SoC

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 3rd 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 😉 ).