Some days of mentoring…

In the last days I spend my free time with men­tor­ing Boris and the SoC stu­dents. Boris is maybe ready to fly solo now (and he already got implic­it aproval for sev­er­al things from me), but I will keep an eye on him from time to time for some more weeks.

The lin­ux­o­la­tor SoC project pro­gress­es faster now. We may have sup­port for TLS, TID and futex­es in the com­ming week (this should allow us to run FC4/FC5 with a lin­ux ker­nel ver­sion of 2.6.x, time will tell).

In the sound SoC project, Ryan cre­at­ed an user repos­i­to­ry. He is more com­fort­able with com­mit­ting “micro-changes” to the user branch first to not spam the per­force mail­inglist. I don’t think this mat­ters, but when he feels more com­fort­able this way, I don’t object. This makes it a lit­tle bit hard­er for me to fol­low, but I will nag him more often for a sta­tus report then.

I also MFCed the fix­es for Ora­cle 10, it should work on 6‑stable too now.

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 😉 ).