Seems I for­got to announce that the linux_base-c6 is in the Ports Col­lec­tion now. Well, it is not a replace­ment for the cur­rent default linux base, the lin­ux­u­la­tor infra­struc­ture ports are miss­ing and we need to check if the ker­nel sup­ports enough of 2.6.18 that noth­ing breaks.

TODO:

• check for updated RPMs for linux_base-c6
• cre­ate lin­ux­u­la­tor infra­struc­ture ports
• improve the ker­nel to sup­port more of linux 2.6.18

To my knowl­edge, nobody is work­ing on any­thing of this. Any­one is wel­come to have a look and pro­vide patches.

Seems that I will actively men­tor again in this Google Sum­mer of Code (as opposed to just review the sub­mis­sions from stu­dents and/or act­ing as a fall-back mentor).

The project I will men­tor is the “Make optional ker­nel sub­sys­tems reg­is­ter them­selves via sysctl”-one from the FreeBSD ideas page.

The stu­dent already got into con­tact with me and it looks like he is moti­vated (he is already sub­scribed to sev­eral FreeBSD mail­inglists, which is not a require­ment we have in our GSoC docs).

Dur­ing the last weeks I iden­ti­fied 64 patches for ZFS which are in 8–sta­ble but not in 7-stable. For 56 of them I had a deeper look and most of them are com­mited now to 7-stable. The ones of those 56 which I did not com­mit are not applic­a­ble to 7-stable (infra­struc­ture dif­fer­ences between 8 and 7).

Unfor­tu­nately this did not solve the sta­bil­ity prob­lems I have on a 7–sta­ble sys­tem.

I also com­mit­ted a diff reduc­tion (between 8-stable and 7-stable) patch which also fixed some not so harm­less mis­merges (mem-leak and ini­tial­iz­ing the same mutex twice at dif­fer­ent places). No idea yet if it helps in my case.

I also want to merge the new arc reclaim logic from head to 8-stable and 7-stable. Maybe I can do this tomorrow.

Cur­rently I run a test with a ker­nel where the shared locks for ZFS are switched to exclu­sive locks.

Due to the prob­lems with a 7–sta­ble machine, I had a look at some unmerged fixes for ZFS (58 changes not merged).

I back­ported some of those changes from 8-stable to 7-stable, I have this run­ning on one 7-stable machine. I would like to get some more feed­back for it (even an “it works for me” would be great). The main part of this change is that the FreeBSD taskqueue is used now instead of the open­so­laris one (and some other changes which may improve the ZFS experience).

It would also be nice if some­one could have a look at the FIRST_THREAD_IN_PROC part. Can there be more than one thread at this place (I do not think so) and I should use FOREACH_THREAD_IN_PROC_instead?

How to apply:

• cd /usr/src/
• fetch http://www.Leidinger.net/FreeBSD/test/releng7_zfs_merge3.diff
• fetch http://www.Leidinger.net/FreeBSD/test/opensolaris_taskq.c
• fetch http://www.Leidinger.net/FreeBSD/test/taskq.h
• mv taskq.h sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/sys/taskq.h
• mv opensolaris_taskq.c sys/cddl/compat/opensolaris/kern/opensolaris_taskq.c
• patch –p 0 –quiet <releng7_zfs_merge3.diff
• ignore the 2 .rej files
• rm –f sys/cddl/compat/opensolaris/sys/taskq_impl.h*
• rm –f sys/cddl/compat/opensolaris/sys/taskq.h*
• rm –f sys/cddl/contrib/opensolaris/uts/common/os/taskq.c*
• rebuild ker­nel

I do not list all of those 16 of 58 out­stand­ing patches which are cov­ered here, a detailed list can be found on the sta­ble and fs mail­inglists.

There was not much to tell in the last months. I was busy with mov­ing and the preg­nancy of my wife (ok, she was more busy with this than I was…).

So the recent updates are, that I took some time to com­mit some of my patches to SVN. Most of them are in my SVN user area in var­i­ous branches. The inter­est­ing ones may be desk­jail and lin­ux­aio. The first one allows to run your desk­top in a jail. The sec­ond one gives async I/O for the lin­ux­u­la­tor.

There’s also some other stuff. Feel free to have a look.

It also seems that the we may see the Fedora 8 infra­struc­ture land­ing in the ports col­lec­tion “soon”. I have the impres­sion that Boris just waits for the com­plete unfreeze of the ports col­lec­tion. The last patch I’ve reviewed looked very good. There are some loose ends, like switch­ing it on as the default linux base for FreeBSD–cur­rent for exam­ple, but those are things which I pre­fer to do later than in the same com­mit. First let it be there for a while and let curi­ous users test it a lit­tle bit more. If every­thing is ok, we can switch the default linux base to F8 in –current.