Another Summer of Code summary: Jordan Gordeev is returning to AMD64 work. He appears to be ahead of schedule, too.
Dan Chis has posted a summary of his Summer of Code project: debugging multi-threaded applications. He also has some details of his current thesis in there… He’s busy.
Hasso Tepper has some xorg updates to fix problems he’s seen with the intel video driver. The versions of these packages in pkgsrc are old enough that the changes can’t be committed ‘upstream’ to xorg, so he’s attacking the problem from the opposite direction and upgrading the software.
He reported significant EXA performance improvements, so it’s definitely worthwhile. It’s tested on DragonFly but will probably benefit other pkgsrc-using platforms too.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit changing how ioapic works may help anyone who has previously had trouble compiling a multiprocessor kernel with IO_APIC enabled. Try it, if that applies to you.
Also, Jordan Gordeev has a potential fix for anyone who has had a failed boot with a ‘BTX Halted’ message; you will have to retrieve it from his Git repo.
Sascha Wildner made two relatively minor commits that solved two long-standing (for me) irritations: a version mismatch in uname for identical versions of DragonFly, and automatic running of newaliases. Both issues have bit me several times in minor but irritating ways over the course of years, and it’s a relief to have them gone. Thanks, Sascha!
More Summer of Code summaries: Robert Luciani has posted what he plans for his MP contention profiling work, and Stathis Kamperis has a description of his C99/POSIX conformance audit testing, with links.
Hasso Tepper has added the open source HAL code for ath(4) (old man page), as suggested by Alexander Polakov. I’m not sure if this is related to Dmitry Komissaroff’s work.
Matthew Dillon has added a Makefile in /usr/src/test/vkernel that automates vkernel setup. You can create a virtual system in one step. ‘make help’ in that directory to see all the options.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s bwi(4) driver for DragonFly is going into FreeBSD 8, as mentioned in this Warner Losh blog post.
I’ve linked to explanations like this before, but it’s worth repeating: when Tim Darby had a crash, Matthew Dillon explained how to obtain a dump. This can be fantastically useful when debugging a crash.
Hasso Tepper pointed out an interesting problem: problems with unistd.h not being available on DragonFly keep a number of C++ programs from compiling. The fact that this doesn’t happen on other platforms appears to be completely accidental.
Alex Hornung posted a nice summary of his DevFS project for DragonFly Google’s Summer of Code – Matthew Dillon has a followup, too.
Are you a Summer of Code student for DragonFly? Don’t forget to post a summary of your project to kernel@ before the start. Yes, I know there’s exams.
Daniel Lorch, the student working on a port of Hammer to Linux, has a blog, with some notes on progress. I found this April item entertaining.
… And Antonio Huete Jimenez has described the few steps required to install it.
Pedro F. Giffuni suggested that the SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA lseek extensions would be good additions to Hammer, and linked to a Sun paper that went into more detail.
If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly, you’ll need to rebuild world and kernel after this recent change to interrupt counting from Sepherosa Ziehau.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has updated his pkg_dry installation script. You won’t need it much longer; it should show up in pkgsrc soon.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert tagged 2.3.1, which is still in the development branch, so don’t update unless you were already at 2.3. There’s a nice list of commits that went into this tag.
Naoya Sugioka has a Qemu patch to make a cloned tap(4) device work; feedback is desired, and Sepherosa Ziehau has already supplied some.
Aggelos Economopoulos added an interesting feature for virtual kernels: the memory of a given virtual kernel is now accessible directly at /proc/$pid/mem .