Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Wed, July 23rd, 10:00 AM

Jon Corbet on Porting Drivers to 2.6

I missed the first few minutes of this talk due to writing down the previous day’s escapades. Tuning back in, Jon is talking about the changed interrupt handler signature. Nothing new so far, I’ve been following this stuff pretty closely during 2.5 development.

Next slides: the linux device model. Impact on drivers can be small, since things are mostly handled at the bus level. Again, nothing new.

Just spotted Ted T’So sneaking into the talk.

Considering heading out of the talk to go and reply to my email… should I? No. But I know this stuff! Yes, but you’re here to listen to talks, not to do email!

Obviously, the email daemon won and I ended up going out of the talk. In my defense, I really did know what he was talking about – even wrote code to interface with some of it. Took care of email, met Bill Irwin and Dave McCracken. Continued debugging my initscripts problem. The problem was that /etc/init.d/network would claim that the network was up, even when it wasn’t. Looking at the logs, they were filled with garbage such as “Jul 24 00:31:22 hydra ifdown: ./ifdown: ++: command not found”. Eventually, I found the problem – /etc/init.d/network calls /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/ifdown, which executes a function from another file, which sources /etc/sysconfig/network-scripts/eth0. Somehow, this file was filled with garbage. I removed it, and now everything is working fine. Hmpf.

During the break, met Shawn Starr, Andrew J. Hutton and erikm.

Next: Paul Mackerels, Low Level Optimizations in the Power PC kernel.