Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

One of the things I set up for Dafna on Saturday was gaim . Today, feeling somewhat weird, I decided to set it up for myself as well. I’m now back on ICQ as number 13390361, muli. Cheers!

I gave an overview talk on the Linux kernel at work today for a departmental seminar. Lots of people showed up, there were some good questions, and I *think* no one fell asleep 😉

Slides are available here in PDF and

The dragon book is of course “Compiler – Principles, Techniques and Tools” that I published for sell or barter here and elsewhere. I ended up trading it with Oleg, in exchange for Peter Norvig‘s Paradigms of Artificial Intelligence Programming and Paul Graham‘s ANSI Common Lisp.

Quoting Oleg: “I can hardly imagine a better use for these books – it’s like giving someone a kitten, you must make sure it will be loved and taken care of.”

No response frmom either Linus or Marcelo to my trident patch yet, which is about as can be expected. Andrew Morton, the (future?) 2.6 maintainer, has picked it up however and included it in 2.6.0-test3-mm1. Neato!

Spent most of the day studying Algorithmics, my summer course at the openu. I think I have a pretty good grasp of the material I missed while we were in Canada now. Too bad I have to study it in a hurry (my fault, bad time management), as this is fascinating material, NP, NPC, co-NP, decidability and computability.

For lunch, I had plans to cook something experimental, but ended up eating at my parents. After lunch, I continued on the never ending quest to set up Dafna’s (my little sister) computer, barcelona, to her heart’s desire and to teach Dafna to work with my favorite OS in the process. barcelona runs debian unstable. Today we continued installing mldonkey, gabber, gaim, flash in mozilla and other stuff. I spent an hour scourging google since gaim complained that the system doesn’t support the he_IL locale (hebrew), and eventually found the correct incantation for adding locales: dpkg-reconfigure locales.

In the evening, I met Haim in the Technion and helped him with his Linux kernel project. I showed him how to compile a kernel with a distribution .config, build an initial ramdisk and boot the new kernel. There was a snag with the first kernel we built, an oops in ext3’s journal code, but I jotted it down to a bad SMP compilation (make -j3 bzImage modules is *supposed* to be safe on 2.4). A conservative recompilation later, everything worked.

When I got back home, I figured out that the simple solution to the trident problem is to just add the missing spin_unlock_irqrestore on the good path in ali_ac97_get(). Mailed to patches to both Linus and Marcelo. Had to resist cleaning up the code in this patch, but added a trident cleanup to my TODO list. Watch this space for the patch.

While compiling various trident versions, ran accross Shawn Star on #kernelnewbies. Shawn pointed me to this great picture of yours truly he took at the OLS 2003 party at the black thorn cafe:

More of Shawn’s OLS pictures here.

Yesterday night I went to my parents place, to give Dafna (my little sitter) her next Linux lesson and chat with my parents. I taught her the mysteries of apt-get, did some finger magic and got the es1371 sound module to load on startup. Next on the agenda – playing a movie with subtitles.

When I got home it was midnight, and I had no concrete plans. Studying was out of the question, and I didn’t particularly feel like hacking, so I poured half a glass (glass, not shot) of whiskey and set out to waste some time on IRC. Once the whiskey was all gone, I switche to Rum and Kiwi juice (it tastes worth than it sounds) and started hacking on shpte, until blessed sleep took me. The solitude was surprisingly enjoyable.

Plan for today: study algorithmics, fix trident (someone broke it in 2.6 *again*), lunch at parents, help Haim with his Technion kernel project in the evening, hack on shpte some more and *gasp* work out. Let’s see how much I get done.

( Forth ) :noname >in source rot @ nip + c@ 1+ parse 2 / tuck + dup
c@ -rot swap 3 tuck - -rot dup 1- * + -rot 0 do over c@ 3 - 2dup
swap - swap dup 98 = if 66 - then emit swap -rot + swap loop cr ;
execute ( Ox ruin huthfv edhwqdk wr idekw Mieou I hkrghe Cthulhu ) 

I wonder if I have a forth interpreter here somewhere…

I just got back from the post office, where I picked up a couple of packages from the Open University. One of them was the course material for the compilation class I’ll be taking next year. The bulk of the package was the book “Compilers – Principals, Techniques and Tools”, by Aho, Sethi and Ullman. Since I already have a copy of the book, I’m offering it up for grabs. Amazon is selling it for 92$. I will sell it for the same price, shipping in Israel on me, or will trade it for a CS/EE/Math book of equal stature. The book is in mint condition. Let me know if interested…

linux.conf.au, Call For Papers. The deadline is Aug. 18th, I need to decide whether to submit my syscalltrack paper, now that I’ve resumed working on the project. I don’t know what’s scarier, getting rejected or getting accepted.

OSDI ’04. That one would be cool to attend, especially as I’ve never been in San Francisco.

I’m writing this on hydra, my laptop, which is running

muli@hydra:~$ uname -a
Linux hydra 2.6.0-test1-shpte #2 SMP Tue Aug 5 16:25:42 IDT 2003 i686 unknown

Note the shpte, standing for Shared Page Tables. Neat!

TODO: port to 2.6.0-test2-latest, and verify that the changes I made to the code are correct.

Happy happy joy joy!