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LoL, just had my dinner and was googling about why kernel can't be updated without rebooting and accidentally came to this site, and to my surprise the name of the site is "kerneltrap", but its trapping ppl like me (Laughs). So time to search the topic again.
Source: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
10:13
In the continuining discussion about how GCC treats the volatile keyword, Linus Torvalds noted, "I just have a strong suspicion that '
volatile' performance is so low down the list of any C compiler persons interest, that it's never going to happen. And quite frankly, I cannot blame the gcc guys for it." He went on to explain, "that's especially as 'volatile' really isn't a very good feature of the C language, and is likely to get *less* interesting rather than more (as user space starts to be more and more threaded, 'volatile' gets less and less useful."
"So I wouldn't expect 'volatile' to ever really generate better code. It might happen as a side effect of other improvements (eg, I might hope that the SSA work would eventually lead to gcc having a much better defined model of valid optimizations, and maybe better code generation for volatile accesses fall out cleanly out of that), but in the end, it's such an ugly special case in C, and so seldom used, that I wouldn't depend on it.
"Quite frankly, I'd like there to be more competition in the open source compiler game, and that might cause some upheavals, but on the whole, gcc actually does a pretty damn good job."
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August 24, 200715:10
If asked to give a clear cut definition of love, don't get surprise that you will be lost. Yeah. It is a very difficult thing to define.
So far, most people have only succeeded in naming its characteristics, telling its impacts on humans, describing how it can be gained or lost, outlining the various types and explaining how people feel when they are in love.
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Source: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
11:57
"The elections for five of the ten members of the Linux Foundation Technical Advisory Board[TAB] are held every year, currently the election will be at the 2007 Kernel Summit in a BOF session," James Bottomley, the TAB chair, announced on the Linux Kernel mailing list. He noted that this voting session would be held on the evening of September 5'th or 6'th, providing an email address for sending nominations and adding that anyone is eligible, "only people invited to the kernel summit will be there in person (and therefore able to vote), but if you cannot attend, your nomination email will be read out before the voting begins." James went on to explain:
"It's really just a represent the community type of role. The LF uses the TAB to get a sense of the community for various things they and their members are thinking. Conversely, the TAB was initially formed to get a set of specific objectives out of the then OSDL (Doc Fellowship, Travel Fund, NDA programme and HW lending library plus a few other things). The TAB takes proposals from the community for things it needs that require an organisation to sort out (a good example of this is the currently being acted on PCI sig membership, which will give us access to the PCI specs plus a vendor ID that the virtualisation people asked for to help with virtual device recognition)."
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Categories: Technology News
August 23, 200711:28
Ingo Molnar announced version 20 of his Completely Fair Scheduler patchset, offering further cleanups for the new scheduler code that will be part of the upcoming 2.6.23 kernel, "there have been lots of small regression fixes, speedups, debug enhancements and tidy-ups - many of which can be user-visible." Ingo went on to summarize:
"There are nearly 100 changes - they do add up to a significant total linecount change. There was no crash bug or hang bug found in the CFS code since v19 was released. (in fact the last crash/hang bug in CFS was found and fixed in v7, more than 3 months ago, and even that crash only happened in an uncommon sw-suspend setup, not during normal use. So CFS has turned out to be a pretty robust codebase.) Nevertheless, if you had any problems (performance or behavioral) with v19 it's worth checking v20 out - and if v19 worked great for you it's worth checking out that v20 still works great =B-)"
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Categories: Technology News
August 22, 200713:06
Last week Skype, the popular, free Net telephony service, was unavailable for a day or two due to technical problems. Failures of big systems are always interesting and this is no exception.
We have only limited information about what went wrong. Skype said very little at first but is now opening up a little. [...]
Source: Freedom to Tinker
Categories: Technology News
August 21, 200723:03
A recent bug report led to a discussion about potentially dropping support for pre-4.0 versions of GCC. Adrian Bunk noted, "currently we support 6 different stable gcc release series, and it might be the right time to consider dropping support for the older ones. Are there any architectures still requiring a gcc " Russell King noted that on some architectures GCC 3.x is still preferable to the newer 4.x branch, "I want to keep support for gcc 3.4.3 for ARM for the foreseeable future. From my point of view, gcc 4 compilers have been something of a development thing as far as the ARM architecture goes. Also, gcc 3.4.3 is faster and significantly less noisy than gcc 4."
When it was asked how many kernel developers use older version of GCC, Linus Torvalds explained that it really doesn't matter, "it's NOT about 'kernel developers'. It's about random people testing kernels. If we make it harder for people to test kernels, we're going to lose. So no, I vote for *not* cutting off old gcc versions unless it's absolutely fatal."
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Categories: Technology News
August 20, 200713:26
Saturday, my used copy of Amped: Notes from a Go-Nowhere Punk Band showed up in my mailbox. Powell's in Portland rocks. I miss being able to just go to that place.
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Source: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
12:17
Jungseung Lee announced the first public release of gitstat, "a GPL'd, web-based git statistics/monitoring system." He explains, "it retrieves a specified git tree, analyzes changesets, and shows graphical information like the number of changesets per day, the number of people who submitted changesets for a specific version(tag), etc." The link above offers a graphical view of Linus' mainline 2.6 kernel tree, with daily commit statistics, monthly commit statistics, kernel release frequency, and per-author statistics. Jungseung noted:
"Gitstat was derived from kfm (kernel feature monitor) which was originally developed by Keun-Sik Lim and Sang-Bae Lee of Samsung Electronics and currently maintained and developed by Jeong-Seung Lee and Soon-Son Kwon(Shawn) of Samsung Electronics. Kfm was inspired from Jon Corbet of lwn.net when he analyzed the git tree and Greg KH when he presented similar status report at OLS2007. We thought it would be interesting information every day."
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Categories: Technology News
05:52
Two Ohio researchers have discovered that some of the state’s e-voting machines put a timestamp on each ballot, which severely erodes the secrecy of ballots. The researchers, James Moyer and Jim Cropcho, used the state’s open records law to get access to ballot records, according to Declan McCullagh’s story at news.com. The pair [...]
Source: Freedom to Tinker
Categories: Technology News
August 17, 200710:50
"People who think '
volatile' really matters are just fooling themselves," Linus Torvalds quipped during a lengthy discussion on the Linux Kernel mailing list. The thread began with a series of patches to "make atomic_read() behave consistently across all architectures" which included "removing the volatile keyword from all atomic_t and atomic64_t definitions that currently have it, and instead explicitly [casting] the variable as volatile in atomic_read()."
Earlier in the discussion Linus had suggested that while it didn't actually fix any bugs it did help hide bugs and make them less likely to be triggered, "and hey, sometimes 'hiding bugs well enough' is ok. In this case, I'd argue that we've successfully *not* had the volatile there for eight months on x86-64, and that should tell people something. " But later in the discussion he related it to superstitions like the fear of a black cat crossing the road, which "has no bigger and longer-lasting direct affects":
"In other words, this whole discussion has just convinced me that we should *not* add back 'volatile' to 'atomic_read()' - I was willing to do it for practical and 'hide the bugs' reasons, but having seen people argue for it, thinking that it actually fixes something, I'm now convinced that the *last* thing we should do is to encourage that kind of superstitious thinking."
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August 16, 200713:42
In a series of 5 patches, Jesper Juhl propsed moving 4K stacks from a debug feature to a non-debug feature, defaulting it to be enabled in the -mm tree. He referred back to a lengthy earlier discussion in which he had proposed making 4K stacks the default in the mainline kernel, then added:
"Based on the comments in that thread I conclude that 4KSTACKS are not really considered a debug-only feature any longer, but the time is not right (yet) to make them the default - and it's certainly not yet the time to get rid of 8K stacks."
"In that thread I promised to provide some patches that would lift 4KSTACKS out of debug-only feature status, which is what the first two patches in this series do. I also said I would provide a patch to make 4KSTACKS 'default y' to get more testing, but restrict that patch to -mm - that's the fifth patch in this series. Patches 3 & 4 in this series move the config option out of the Kernel hacking menu and into Processor types and features".
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Categories: Technology News
09:01
Last week’s review of the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) machine by twelve-year-old “SG” was one of our most-commented-upon posts ever. Today I want to follow up on a few items.
First, the machine I got for SG was the B2 (Beta 2) version of the OLPC system, which is not the latest. Folks [...]
Source: Freedom to Tinker
Categories: Technology News
01:11
SELECT NAME, VALUE, DECODE (isdefault, 'TRUE', 'Y', 'N') AS "Default",
DECODE (isem, 'TRUE', 'Y', 'N') AS sesmod,
DECODE (isym,
'IMMEDIATE', 'I',
'DEFERRED', 'D',
'FALSE', 'N'
) AS sysmod,
DECODE (imod,
'MODIFIED', 'U',
'SYS_MODIFIED', 'S',
read more | Sponsor KernelTrap.orgSource: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
August 15, 200718:06
In a June of 1992 posting to the linux-activists mailing list, Linus Torvalds described the original Linux scheduler noting, "the scheduler in linux is pretty simple, but does a reasonably good job at giving good IO response while not being too unfair against cpu-bound processes." A year later, Linus posted a more detailed description of the scheduler noting, "the linux scheduling algorithm is one of the simplest ones possible". Comments in the original 254 line
sched.c file read, "'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). The one thing you might take a look at is the signal-handler code here."
Comments in the current 6,709 line sched.c file show the first changes being made in 1996 by Dave Grothe, "to fix bugs in semaphores and make semaphores SMP safe". Two years later Andrea Arcangeli is credited with implementing "schedule_timeout() and related stuff". It was not until 2002, ten years after Linus' original code was written, that the scheduler received a complete rewrite, "new ultra-scalable O(1) scheduler by Ingo Molnar: hybrid priority-list and round-robin design with an array-switch method of distributing timeslices and per-CPU runqueues." Con Kolivas is credited with "interactivity tuning" in 2003, and Nick Piggin added "scheduler domains" in 2004. A more recent rewrite of the scheduler happened in April, again by Ingo Molnar, this time with his Completely Fair Scheduler.
read more | Sponsor KernelTrap.orgCategories: Technology News
18:06
In a June of 1992 posting to the linux-activists mailing list, Linus Torvalds described the original Linux scheduler noting, "the scheduler in linux is pretty simple, but does a reasonably good job at giving good IO response while not being too unfair against cpu-bound processes." A year later, Linus posted a more detailed description of the scheduler noting, "the linux scheduling algorithm is one of the simplest ones possible". Comments in the original 254 line
sched.c file read, "'schedule()' is the scheduler function. This is GOOD CODE! There probably won't be any reason to change this, as it should work well in all circumstances (ie gives IO-bound processes good response etc). The one thing you might take a look at is the signal-handler code here."
Comments in the current 6,709 line sched.c file show the first changes being made in 1996 by Dave Grothe, "to fix bugs in semaphores and make semaphores SMP safe". Two years later Andrea Arcangeli is credited with implementing "schedule_timeout() and related stuff". It was not until 2002, ten years after Linus' original code was written, that the scheduler received a complete rewrite, "new ultra-scalable O(1) scheduler by Ingo Molnar: hybrid priority-list and round-robin design with an array-switch method of distributing timeslices and per-CPU runqueues." Con Kolivas is credited with "interactivity tuning" in 2003, and Nick Piggin added "scheduler domains" in 2004. A more recent rewrite of the scheduler happened in April, again by Ingo Molnar, this time with his Completely Fair Scheduler.
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August 14, 200710:25
In an overwhelmingly large series of 556 patches, Joe Perches attempted to track down maintainers for a significant number of files within the Linux kernel source tree. He explained, "I grew weary of looking up the appropriate maintainer email address(es) to CC: for a patch", adding a new line format to the kernel MAINTAINERS file parsed by a new
get_maintainer.pl script.
Much of the feedback was criticism of the large number of patches that flooded the inboxes of all subscribers to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. Others suggested that the information would be better extracted from Git than from source files. When Joe asked for better ideas for achieving his end goal, Alan Cox suggested, "working off the git tree as it shows who actually is making changes/updating stuff recently and why which is a major clue when tracing bugs". Chris Wright pointed out, "I think this data will easily become stale. What is the point again?" going on to add "between git (or gitweb), existing MAINTAINERS and a bit of common sense (or extra sleuthing), I never perceived a significant problem." Adrian Bunk countered, "for active kernel developers like you and me it's not a problem. But for other people it's non-trivial to always figure out who the maintainer of some part of the kernel is."
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05:05
This Blog is for the Novice techie's to learn Linux Kernel through their personal experience.
Source: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
03:22
hi,
i am trying to find out the interrupt latency for the linux-2.6.14, can anyone tell me what is the procedure to test latency and the code used to test it? please help me out to achieve this job....
Source: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
August 13, 200723:06
A bottleneck is quite literally a small part of your installation (hardware or software), where too much processing is being funneled through a specific area. In other words, far too much is going on in one particular area of an installation, in comparison with any other part.
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Source: KernelTrap Journals
Categories: Technology News
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