Lin­ux­u­la­tor news

Today I com­mit­ted the updat­ed lin­ux aio stuff to p4. It’s a mod­ule now, so it can be loaded as need­ed. I also updat­ed the p4 diff in the wiki, so any­one can down­load and test it (please do it!).

Major fea­tures in the p4 diff are futex­es and TLS for amd64. So if you own an amd64 sys­tem please down­load the patch and give it a try. I’m inter­est­ed in reports for linux-firefox, skype, realplay­er and acrore­ad on amd64.

There’s one known bug with the mmap behav­ior on amd64 (even in cur­rent). I don’t know if this only affects the LTP tests or real world appli­ca­tions, but because there’s much time between the mmap com­mits and the report, I think it’s only a prob­lem for the regres­sion tests and not a prob­lem which shows up in typ­i­cal usage scenarios.

Progress in the linuxulator

On of the major show­stop­per bugs in the lin­ux 2.6 emu­la­tion is that acrore­ad does not work. Now we have patch­es (proof of con­cept by Intron, refined patch by Kib) for it. I did­n’t had time to test it yet (mind you, every­one else is not able to run acrore­ad with 2.6, I’m able to run it at least with some files or no file at all), but I want to do an exten­sive test (I know sev­er­al ways of killing it with 2.6).

If every­thing goes well and no oth­er show­stop­per bug appears, we may be able to request more exten­sive test­ing of the 2.6 emu­la­tion, at least on i386. First this should be done by ask­ing peo­ple to switch, and maybe after a week by switch­ing the default emu­la­tion to 2.6 in ‑cur­rent (at least for a while).

This is spe­cial­ly impor­tant as the Fedo­ra Lega­cy project announced that they will aban­don sup­port for FC4. FC5+ is not able to run on a 2.4 kernel.

And while I’m at it: I sub­mit­ted the sta­tus report for the lin­ux­u­la­tor. It con­tains some nice sta­tis­tic about the num­ber of fixed bugs (com­par­ing 6.2 and ‑cur­rent). No, I will not tell you in advance, you have to wait some days until the report shows up. 😛