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Pete Zaitcev: 20 Mar 2003

Funnily how the David Dawes made the ejection of Keith Packard from XFree86 to coincide with the begining of the next battle in the war with Islamists. Coincidence, no doublt.

William Lee Irwin III: 17 Mar 2003

Page clustering is looking pretty stable except for the swap
refcounting issue. I managed to blame the wild NMI issue on
qlogicisp.c and I'm just sort of grinding away slowly at
debugging the do_anonymous_page() antifragmentation
heuristics.

cpumask_t stuff is going slow. Probably needs non-x86 support.

I'll get some more ideas eventually.

KernelTrap: Banner Contest, Cast Your Vote

Submitted by Jeremy
on March 16, 2003 - 3:34pm

There have been a number of banners submitted in our recent contest [story], though no themes. You can view all submissions and vote on them here, so please take a look and cast your vote (registered users can vote up to five times, whereas anonymous users are only able to vote once).

If you have a banner that you forgot to submit, go ahead and send it now.

A final selection will be made toward the end of the month. Whether or not we change to a new default banner/logo will depend on the feedback I get, so leave your comments...

Pete Zaitcev: 15 Mar 2003

I just wasted a perfectly good week on an s390x bug in recent kernels. If a 64 bit program executes a 31 bit program, load_elf_binary() uses TASK_UNMAPPED_BASE before it sets the mode bit, but on some platforms the former uses the latter. So, the /etc/ld.so cannot mmap anything. A whole week!!

Theodore Ts'o: The simple things that make a geek happy....

Whee! A quick ten minute hack involving some left-over X-10 hardware,
"apt-get install heyu", a quick edit of a configuration file, and I
can now remotely reboot my kernel crash and burn test machine, even if
it's completely wedged, by the simple set of commands:

heyu turn computer off
heyu turn computer on

I am so pleased with myself.

I am s

Pete Zaitcev: 7 Mar 2003

Welcome, Riel

Rik van Riel posted his first message to internal lists today, and is getting settled at his new place, which is to say, in the same team with me (centered around Boston). I am pretty sure he'll like it here. This is very cool. We attract all the very best people, and I hope that some of their smarts rubs off on me.

Theodore Ts'o: The Duras Sisters

The last time I visited my friend Leonard Zubkoff, he gave me a batch of CD's back from when he was doing professional recording of filk groups. Being all-too-busy, I never had a chance to listen to them all, which was a shame, since I never had a chance to tell him how good they all. I recently started listening to "Masquerading as Human", by a three women acapella Filk group called "The Duras Sisters". It's really excellent! Even though Leonard was just the recording engineering, I can hear his hand in the album, and certainly it reminds me of his sense of humor.

Zwane Mwaikambo: 5 Mar 2003

Working on opensource software can get so frustrating at times. There are a great many times when it simply doesn't seem worth it.

Pete Zaitcev: 5 Mar 2003

Yesteday, I stepped off the terminal for an evening stroll, and was greeted by the following message upon return:


RPIMGR046T User ID ETPRPTN access has been revoked.

LOGOFF AT 22:13:02 CST TUESDAY 03/04/03 BY SYSTEM

Since my patches and trees were on destroyed minidisks, two days of work were wasted. Oh well. Examination of mail archives revealed that I was warned with a single word:

Pete Zaitcev: 3 Mar 2003

I just realized that I spent a whole week (with weekend) trying to get IBM BladeCenter to work with obsolete kernels.
Feeling a little numb now.

William Lee Irwin III: 26 Feb 2003

Got page clustering and NR_CPUS > BITS_PER_LONG stuff on
the chopping block. No idea if/when stuff will get merged.
Page clustering is taking longer than expected to get bugs
flushed out of it. Still hammering it hard.

KernelTrap: Logo and Theme Contest, Cash Prizes

Submitted by Jeremy
on February 26, 2003 - 7:02am

We'll be upgrading the server running KernelTrap shortly, thanks to the many donations received so far [story]. To date, 21 people have donated a total of $370.90 (after PayPal's fees). My intention is to order the new server this weekend, having it up and running handling live traffic by the end of March. Bandwidth for the new server is being donated by Danube Technologies.

On the new server, I'll be upgrading to the latest release of Drupal, which will most notably add comment moderation and discussion forums to the site. Additionally, there will be numerous performance optimizations taking place behind the scenes to better handle heavy loads.

With this upgrade, I would also like to introduce a new KernelTrap logo and theme. Unfortunately, my artistic skills are limited to stick figures and vague scribbles, my web layout skills not much better. Instead, I'm opening up the new logo and theme design to KernelTrap readers. If interested, read on for full details.

n/a

Theodore Ts'o: Ghastly Catonese access

It's 20 minutes into the hour, which means if I start watching Buffy the Vampire Slayer now on my TiVO, I won't run out of show when I fast forward past all of the commercials. (TV networks of the world, shudder in fear; the Tivo changes everything.)

My initial observation from watching the intro "teaser".... if you're going to try to have the "potential slayer" from Hong Kong try to speak Cantonese, either don't bother, or dub her over with someone who can actually speak the language properly....

Theodore Ts'o: Catching up on Live Journal

This past week has has been amazingly insane, so I haven't had the chance to read LJ at all. Things aren't better in that regard, although I have been making progress on some of the items on my todo list.... but I needed a break, so I took some time off and read through seven days worth of LJ entries all at once.

One of the things which really struck me after doing all of this reading is how much so many of the entries relate to feelings, concerns, in my own life. From folk's struggling/angsting over love, money, life goals, etc., to the (admittedly rarer) entries about life's successes and joys, it really shows that in the many ways that count, there are so many ways in which are hopes and dreams are all the same. The love and compassion that this inspires me to feel towards others also spills over to myself, and that's a good thing.