Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

The first day of the Linux sysprogramming class ended up being more interesting than I expected. I used the boring bits to hack on trident, and did a bunch of cleanups I’ve been meaning to do for ages (lock_set_fmt, a macro, was calling return if taking the lock failed. Ugh). I have more plans for tomorrow’s boring parts, but I’ll put up the interim patch in a bit after verifying that it works. It’s currently compiling.

I put up the util-linux tcp-udp nfs mount ordering patch. This patch gives the user greater control over which protocol (TCP or UDP) to use when contacting the NFS server, and whether to fallback to the other one. It’s a bit ugly (mostly because of nfsmount’s ugliness), and I’m waiting to hear what aeb, the maintainer, has to say. While putting it up, I gave the website and especially the CV a much-needed cleanup.

Back to work after a week of military reserve duty, to find two new books waiting for me:
– Linux Kernel Development, by Robert Love
– Unix Systems for Modern Architectures – Symmetric Multiprocessing and Caching for Kernel Programmers, by Curt Schimmel

Yay for new books!

In other news, the weekend was mostly great. On friday ladypine and me went food shopping, and then had a great meal at Spargo accompanied by a bottle of very nice French wine *hic*. Then I met Vered (sister number one) for coffee, and then I spent a few hours setting up the scanner funcionality on Dafna’s (sister number two) HP PSC 2410 printer/scanner, on her Debian unstable system. It works, and I’ll document what I did (why yes, it *did* require a kernel recompilation!) soonish.

On Saturday, ladypine and me went to see LotR. All I can say is that once is definitely not enough. Then we had a quiet weekend at home, had a bit of a fight, discussed many things and reached many conclusions. Then I studied. Small statement, big achievement.

Today I have the first part of a “Linux System Programming” course at work. I daren’t get my hopes too high, but I hope to learn something. At worst (clueless instructor being the worst-case scenario), I’ll pretend to be listening and just hack the kernel all day. Watch this space for my real-time review of the class…