I have the "isochronous" scheduling patch working now. Any task trying to start as real time that doesn't have authority to do so will be set to SCHED_ISO. This is a non-expiring scheduler policy designed to guarantee a timeslice within a reasonable latency while preventing starvation. Good for gaming, video at the limits of hardware, video capture etc. It is best set using the schedtool by a normal user trying to start something as SCHED_RR.

Whoa, I need to update this more often!

Anyway, the holiday period has come and gone, with me taking a trip to Prague over the New Years and subsequently getting sick whilst there. Ugh. At least I had lots of fun while I was there, and got to drink some of the best beer I've had yet ;)

Anyway, that move to XFce I was contemplating is a done deal - I'm running XFce 4.0.3.1. I've also gone and updated the gdm theme for my graphical login page, since the old theme was starting to look dated. I've been busily updating my system with apt (love that app!) and trying to fix PartitonMagic 8.01 - the damn thing refuses to resize my NTFS partiton because of the infamous Error 1513 bug. What's worse is that Symantec won't send me the fix! Ugh.

I miss the days of maintaining the -ck patchset...

I decided to split out the patches more cleanly. Since not many people use the batch scheduling but have hyperthread cpus and use "nice" I separated the hyperthread patches into a separate hyperthread aware "nice" patch and the hyperthread aware batch patch.

http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.1/

I've improved the hyperthread priority work further. It has no effect on real time tasks now as they should run regardless of priority difference to prevent latency. Also the tasks put to sleep for priority reasons are woken up as soon as possible now to not wait for the next timer interrupt. While the latency of 1ms is not important it is possible for a high priority task to wake up for a microsecond each millisecond and prevent the lower priority task from hardly running at all.

I managed to kill off the bug that made the machine hang when trying to spawn a process as batch scheduling with the schedtools. I don't let kernel threads have any special hyperthread treatment. This is also a nice way of getting "system" stuff done by a hyperthread sibling which uses few of the physical cpu's resources and leaves one runqueue free for user tasks. I've documented the ht patch a little too now.

In the absence of anyone else doing the hyperthread stuff I was interested in, I've updated my patches to do it myself. Hyperthread awareness now extends to nice values and I've updated the functionality of my patches a little.
http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.1/

I tried to install kernel 2.6.1 into my sytem with the following Specs:

Processor: Athlon
Video Card: Nvidia GeForce2 MX
Audio: Ensoniq 5880 AudioPCI
Video Card: 3c905B 100BaseTX[Cyclone]

I want to enable the bluetooth support as well as the bootsplash, so I downloaded the following patches:

[1] http://www.holtmann.org/linux/kernel/patch-2.6.1-mh1.gz
[2] ftp://ftp.suse.com/pub/people/stepan/bootsplash/kernel/bootsplash-3.1.3-...

Resynced my remaining few patches with 2.6.1

http://ck.kolivas.org/patches/2.6/2.6.1/

Extra lines because this won't allow a short blog.

Like all respectable geeks, I spent the transition from 2003 to 2004 installing Linux on a friend's computer. I was hoping it to be a very joyous and auspicious way to step start the new year but it turned out to be a lot different. Rather enjoyed it in a vaguely masochistic way.

Firstly we tried installing Windows 98, as all she wanted to do was get online and do that quick (also she hasn't been formally introduced to Linux); well, that didn't happen. The installation "general protection fault"ed and left us all bleary eyed. Then we tried out WindowsME (what were we thinking) and that too went belly up. Then we decided to go ahead with a *real* operating system.

I installed 2.6.1-rc1 last night, as soon as I saw it announced here and, luckily, had a quick look though dmesg after booting.

As is my usual practice, I had compiled in support for all of my hardwear and my main filesystems, taken out the noop scheduler and a coupld of other things, and turned off stuff that I didn't need. Turns out I DO need HIGHMEM support or I loose nearly 100M of RAM. Kconfig makes this less than clear with its values of off, 4G and 64G and no help for the HIGHMEM option.

12/23/2003

My main interests are learning Linux , 3D graphics , and
real time simulators.

I am still trying to get the 2.6.0 kernel to run and recognize
all of my computer hardware. My home computer is a 700 MHZ

compaq set up to dual boot Windows ME and REd Hat Fedora Core 1.

I have both the standard 2.4.22 kernel and the 2.6.0 kernel installed. Both kernel versions have some issues.

Yup, been getting my first up-close-and-personal taste of SMP Linux lately. I've always had a dream of running having 2-way home boxen, but this beats all. I as given an NCR S50 to put OSCAR on (read previous blog entry for description of OSCAR) and although the beast was absolutely full of dust and looked as if Grace Murray Hopper cut her octal teeth on it, I soon discovered that it was more than just a ~80-pound hunk of steel. The dust was easily accounted for once I opened this baby up and saw the ~9 cooling fans blowing on what I soon found to be quad PII Xeons (450 MHz apiece). This is pretty marvellous (OK, OK, your Athlon 64 FX still rocks it, but seriously, this thing is MASSIVELY PARALLEL=EXTREMELY COOL to me!) to start with, but this was hardly all. I still haven't figured out exactly how many SCSI controllers it has (!!), but including the four-channel card for the 10-drive external (monstrous 100-pound) array (with 5 18GB 10K Wide SCSI drives) it has at least 10 channels on at least four controllers, ranging from 10MHz Narrow to 160MBps UltraWide. Plus the very-decent 1GB ECC RAM. Oh yeah, and triply-redundant power.

Having installed Gentoo for the first time at home recently, I feel like a giddy-headed teenager in love once more. Got absolutely no issues with the hardware... everything went so smooth that it almost made me cry. X on i830 is not very fun though, even after emerge-ing xfree and xfree-drm and compiling kernel with i830 support minus the i830 drm (which in the stock kernel is for X 4.2 apparently), my X still refuses to do higher resolutions on higher bit depths.

As soon as I'm comfortable with what I've done, and it's all working, I'll post what I did to setup the mail server and what I did wrong in finding out WHAT to do.

Finally, got something figured out with a mail server.

I can effectively recieve (only) e-mail at the address dave @ davesversion.com.

I have to appologize to Sean for baggering him with constant incoherent questions about MX records and so forth, due to me simply being too impatient to read through the sendmail book I got as an early christmas present.