Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

I spent most of the weekend working on the x86-64 DMA mapping ops patch and being sick, not necessarily in this order. The latest version of the patch (-K3) is available here. In a few minutes, once the automated tests will finish running, I’ll email it to Andi Kleen and lkml and ask for inclusion. I hope it doesn’t break anyone’s machines… and if it does, I hope it at least breaks then in new and interesting ways!

On Sunday I had a long day at work, mostly talking to various people about various things. Hmm, that’s way too amorphous. Let’s see what I can elaborate on: we’re seeing a strange scheduling bug with the vanilla kernel on a 4 CPU machine (2 CPUs, each hyperthreaded). I had a meeting with my boss and got tentative travel approval to attend the Xen summit in Austin in January. At night I went for a sportive walk with my dad and prepared the slides for a talk I gave on Monday, “The Xen Hypervisor and Its IO Subsystem” to the storage research seminar at work.

On Monday I woke up early to finish the slides, and then drove to Tel-Aviv to give the talk. The trip took 2.5 hours (as opposed to an hour or so normally) because of massive traffic jams. Eventually I found the site, gave the talk, and then had lunch with the team and discussed a pretty cool project we’re considering for next year (more details later; for the time being suffice to say it involves Xen and storage). Then I drove back to the office, worked for a couple of hours (for values of work that mostly involve transatlantic phone calls), and headed to Haifux.

At Haifux Ami Chayun gave a summary of his visit to the Blackhat Briefings and DEFCON, concentrating on ciscogate and a few other interesting talks. Since I’m reasonably familiar with Michael Lynn’s work, I spent most of the talk trying to figure out how Xen’s save and restore mechanism works, and how to fix it, since it’s currently broken. And that’s about all the news that’s fit to print!