Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Wed, 15:00

After Jon Corbet’s porting to 2.6 talk, went to hear Hirokazu Takawa talking about porting Linux to the M32R architecture. This talk, how shall I put it gently, left a lot to be desired. The speaker, while obviously knowing what he was talking about, spoke in a monotone, broken english, that made following along practically impossible. I gave up and decided to read the paper instead, and went out in the middle.

After this talk, went to eat lunch with zwane, sarnold, Nick Piggins and Orna. For some inexplicable reason, we ended up in the mall’s fast food court, and the food’d quality was about as good as could be expected – that is, not at all.

After lunch, went to hear Matthew Porter’s Bringing PowerPC Book E Processor to Linux talk. This was a pretty good talk, which was a relief after the previous two talks. Low level, dealing with memory management and the peculiarities of the Book E processor, which is a PowerPC variant.

The I went to hear Paul Mackerras, on Low Level Optimizations in the PowerPC Kernel. This was an excellent talk, dealing with three low level optimizations: PTE management, memcpy implementations and cache management (the PPC architecture is not cache coherent). I really enjoyed this talk, not in the list because Paul Mackerras is a great speaker, clear and interesting. I wonder if I could get a PPC machine from work to play with 😉

At this point, I have to make a small disgression. OLS thus far is not what I expected. It seems that I don’t have anything to talk to people about, with syscalltrack development in a stand still, and my kernel work being too trivial to mention, in my (probably wrong) opinion. It’s probably all in my head, but it makes me feel pretty lousy. after Paul’s talk I headed back to the room since my eyes were burning from the contact lenses I left in over night (don’t do that, kids). I ate a quicky dinner, and instead of going back, fell asleep and woke up at 1 AM. Missed the last talk of the day and the welcome reception. Oh well. I briefly considered going out to a random pub and finding who was there, and instead read until sometime in the early morning, and then went back to sleep. So much for OLS, day 1.

Next: Dave Jones on resurrecting unmaintained code.