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.

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!!

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

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.

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.

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

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RPIMGR046T User ID ETPRPTN access has been revoked.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:

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.

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.

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....

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.

Sacred the body God has created,
temple of Spirit that dwells deep inside.
Cherish each person; nurture relation.
Treat flesh as holy, that love may abide.

Bodies are varied, made in all sizes,
pale, full of color, both fragile and strong.
Holy the difference, gift of the Maker,
so let us honor each story and song.

Love respects persons, bodies and boundaries.

I'm in distro mode, nothing happening at the kernel front, Conectiva
Linux for Sparc 32 is now using gcc 3.2.1, latest binutils and glibc 2.3.1, everything OK up to now, but I still have to update the cross
compilers to 3.2.1 so that I can get back using my dual athlon machine as the compile server...

mwh, obi, others:

Note that filtering on List-ID or X-Mailing-List isn't 100% reliable. You probably want to filter on the SMTP reverse-path, which will usually end up in a 'Return-Path' header or the 'From ' line.

List-ID and X-Mailing-List get preserved if someone bounces (in pine parlance, aka 'redistributes') a mail to you.

Wow. Twice this past week, someone has asked me if I've lost weight, and commented that I looked a lot better. I have lost 20 pounds in the last couple of months, and I have lost about two inches in the waistline, but I didn't think that I my looks had actually changed that much, or that the weight loss was noticeable.

Whee!!