Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Highlight of the day: Calendar updates from Lotus Notes are now automatically sent – via procmail – to my mobile toy^H^H^Hphone.

I spent most of the day today working on the Other Project. On the Linux/Xen front I partook in the usual merging activity, as well as testing djwong’s aic94xx patches and reviewing Laurent’s calgary-locate-bbar patch. I’m very happy with this patch, it allows us to get rid of an awful hack – going from dev->bus->number to RIO node ID and BBAR address. It’s awful because it relies on dev->bus->number and the formula being used remaining stable across kernel, BIOS and chipset revisions, which is highly unlikely. In fact, what prompted Laurent’s patch was the forumla being wrong for an x460 configured in a certain way. With the patch we now get the right values for each PHB from the BIOS supplied tables.

I decided to experiment with the “activity log” format again.

30/10/06 – Spent the day at the Intel Developer Forum in Tel-Aviv. Interesting tidbits: VT-d is going to be shipping in ’07, next generation VT-x will have Extended Page Tables and a tagged TLB. Basically guest page tables will translate from virtual to guest physical and EPT will translate from guest physical to machine addresses. The TLB will include the entire translation (hence the need for a tagged TLB to avoid a TLB flush when doing a VM switch). Didn’t get any hacking done but talked to lots of interesting people.

29/10/06 – Linux: wrote patch for mainline to make it possible to compile Calgary in but not use it (patch is at http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/kernel/people/muli/calgary/calgary-choose-to-use). This is mostly for the distros. Xen: got stock xenlinux running on undeg with aic94xx, verified 3com NIC works fine in dom0.

28/10/06 – Debugging Laurent’s Calgary bug (http://bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.cgi?id=7407). Calgary’s BBAR register was getting initialized by the BIOS to a different address than the one we were expecting. Laurent put together a preliminary patch to get the BBAR address from the BIOS supplied tables rather than calculating it directly. This is somewhat problematic as the necessary headers are only defined for i386, whereas Calgary lives in arch/x86_64, so we’ll need to figure out a clean way to use them.

I have a new toy. With newly found appreciation of new toys, I went looking for more. The Chumby looks really neat.

Yael Ben-Yehuda was born at 2:35 PM yesterday, weighing 3.415 kgs. Mother, baby and father are all doing great. I’m sure ladypine will have more to say once she recuperates.

I’ll be mostly offline for the next few days, for obvious reasons.

Muli “Who’s Your Daddy” Ben-Yehuda.

Henceforth, 2.6.19-rc1 shall be known as the Kernel of Pain.