KernelTrap - Linux

davej: Friday 10th December 2004

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 23:19:17 +0000

The most bizarre thing has happened with the AGPGART code.
So, it's been working fine for months. Until recently, when
I disabled the 4g/4g patch in the Fedora kernel (currently
still in 'updates-testing'), and people started noticing X
random oopses and lockups on logging out of Gnome.
This led to much head-scratching, and various theories.
Today Alan did an audit of the agpgart code, and opened
up a real can of worms. There are a number of PCI posting
bugs, CPU cache flushing bugs, missing TLB flushes,
and god knows what next. The more I look into it, the
uglier it gets. It's a miracle things work at all.
Worms. Everywhere.

Robert Love: Ninjas are Mammals

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 20:41:01 +0000

I recently learned that my
book
is used in the operating system design
course at
Columbia (that is the Ivy League, to you). Happy to hear that!

The other day, I was debugging a hard lock in my experimental rewrite of
inotify's locking. I finally got some sort of back trace out of the kernel
before it choked, so I wrote down the trace, register dump, etc. on my
whiteboard. I spent the next day or so studying my whiteboard, tracking down
the problem:

Advogato diary for John Levon

Fri, 10 Dec 2004 15:00:16 +0000

davej: Thursday 09th December 2004

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 23:19:16 +0000

Went into the office to do battle with the build system.
Came off worse for wear. After much 'it works' 'no it doesnt'
to'ing and fro'ing, things seem in better state.
I think I broke a record. Yesterdays kernel build took
26 hours to complete.

Robert Love: Dying Dollars and Cool T-Shirts

Thu, 09 Dec 2004 09:10:05 +0000

The other day, I read the latest figures on the dollar's performance: Over
the last three years, it has fallen some 30-odd percent against the euro
and 20-something percent against the yen.

While a lot of people are pulling for a weaker dollar, the
world needs to get serious about the current global financial system before
we all regret it. To be fair, the blame for the dollar's current state is
largely--although not entirely--domestic. Our deficit is huge
and reckless and expected to get larger. With that, the dollar will only
weaken and those willing to finance our debt will only dwindle (or demand
higher returns). Our current fiscal policies suck and absolutely harm the
dollar's reserve-currency status. We need to stop blaming Europe and Japan's
slow growth and
starting listening to Greenspan
and begin a change in US policy toward a stronger dollar, beginning with a
reduction in the deficit.