Muli Ben-Yehuda's journal

Made it to Ottawa for OLS. Going out to dinner now. Terribly excited. More later.

[spent last week in the NY area, with a brief jaunt to the Niagara Falls area. Details to come]

So it looks like I’ll be doing some Infiniband work soon. I’m looking for a technical introduction before diving into the spec – is this book any good?

Of the two projects I care about that were using BK, one is using git and also has a mercurial tree, and the other is using mercurial. Time to dive into hg…

[root@xenbox ~]# vm-build.linux 1 los0-image "xxx"
...
[root@xenbox ~]# vm-pause -u 1
(XEN) Domain 1 (vcpu#0) crashed on cpu#0:
(XEN) CPU:    0
(XEN) EIP:    e019:[]
(XEN) EFLAGS: 00000202   CONTEXT: guest
(XEN) eax: 00000000   ebx: 00000000   ecx: 00000000   edx: 00000000
(XEN) esi: 001e1000   edi: 00000000   ebp: 001e3ffc   esp: 001e3fe8
(XEN) cr0: 8005003b   cr3: 09383000
(XEN) ds: e021   es: e021   fs: e021   gs: e021   ss: e021   cs: e019
(XEN) Guest stack trace from esp=001e3fe8:
(XEN)    00000000 001002dc 0001e019 00000202 001e1000 00000000

This may not look like much, but it means that Xen is
loading a movitz
image and launching into it. Score!

(can
you tell it’s exam week?)

There was an excellent Haifux meeting last night. 8 people gave lightning talks on various subjects, with a mostly-common theme of retro computing. I gave my “world’s smallest kernel” aka “here’s how to write a bootsector” talk, which went ok, I guess. (tarball with the code). I particularly enjoyed Oron’s talk (various old Unixes running on a pdp11 simulator…), guy’s “ascii art” talk and Alon and Boaz’s talks (almost full talk list available here).

It was also nice being in Haifux again after a long time and mostly listening. I forgot how much I enjoy the geeky atmosphere and conversations.

Amazon was kind enough to inform me this morning that Dan Simmons has a sequel to llium coming out. Now to wait for the paperback…

I’ve had a pretty productive day today, for a change. First I finally finished reviewing the papers for August Penguin 2005, and then I wrote the code for “the world’s smallest kernel”, the lightning talk I’ll give at the upcoming Haifux meeting. I don’t want to elaborate on the subject until after the talk, but there’s a hint if you look closely.

Productivity needs to be rewarded. Today’s loot: Marine Rifleman: Forty-Three Years in the Corps by Wesley L. Fox and Currahee!: A Screaming Eagle at Normandy, by Donald R. Burgett.

Creating the Innocent Killer: Ender’s Game, Intention, and Morality.

If you’ve read Ender’s Game, and wondered why you like it so much… this paper is certainly thought provoking.

Currently reading: the presentations from Fast-OS 2005.

Excellent work out this morning. What a difference loading the ipod with trance and house music makes.

Bare Metal Emacs. Awesome.