Older blog entries for Bryce (starting at number 337)

Monday

Knackered from yesterdays activities. Stumbled into work at 10:00.

Ok so tux2 still fails on some simple testinging on the alpha. Sent the normal fix or die messages to Ingo. Hopefully something wonderful will happen as a result.

Telsa still having me move the BryceCAM around to follow _A_. _A_ on the other hand decided to retrain it on the scooby-doo cardboard cutout instead. Telsa sulked.

Come lunchtime, we all wandered off to get a BBQ feed. Personally, I think the BBQ beef brisket in Texas is a lot better however, the beef was perfectly acceptable. Avoided the pork BBQ plates as I happened to know that it was north carolinian BBQ pork (seasoned with vinagar), something of an aquired taste. Much discussion about kernel and linux exhibitions we'd all been too.

Back to the office, rebuilding kernels. Again tux2 struck out on the alpha. Another couple of emails and traces sent off to Ingo. The rest of the afternoon was mainly everyone building kernels, beating on them with the test suites until the kernels smashed with corruption problems. Poor bcrl, he's finding bugs, fixing them and finding even more bugs hiding behind the ones he's just fixed,.. it's like fighting a large armey of darkness because no one understands how the 2.4 kernel ever worked before now.

Come time for dinner, the rest of the team decided they'd all run off for an Italian dinner. Unfortunately, the only Italian that I actually like is umm pizza (hangs head in shame). Opted out and beat on the kernel while everyone else was away off.

Sometime later at night while we're all banging away on the keyboards, something of intrest made the entire kernel team run off into the lab. Meanwhile while they were busy going 'oo ah' over HW, Seklos had directed my attention to a new item that had poped up on amazon.com who were advertizing 256Mb of RAM @ $11.99 reduced to $9.99. Made an emergancy purchace of 8Gb of RAM. Then when the rest of the kernel team turned up again, I pointed out the offer at which point credit cards appeared from everywhere. In the end.. 8+32+32+32+384.. 488 sticks of ram were bought @$9.99. 15 minutes later the price of the RAM shot up to $329.99. With luck, they'll honor the original orders we placed. bcrl is busy trying to work out just how rich he'll become reselling his allocation. I'm busy trying to work out where to find a motherboard that accepts so many PC133 DIMMS.

Much glee as we wandered off home thinking about our purchases. It'll take about 2 weeks for them to arrive, however, it's equally possible that they'll cancel the orders at the Amazon end of the universe. Fingers crossed 8)

Sunday

Alarm went off at 09:30 (like it was supposed to).. and 09:35, 40, 45, 50, 55...
Got the hint and got up/dressed and drove off to the office.

No sign of bcrl or _A_ (10:30)

Phoned mum to wish her best (mothers day in the UK). Caught up on all the unpleasentness of the current foot and mouth restrictions in the provance

Wandered outside again to let _A_ in (10:50) and a bit later on drove over to la quinta to pick bcrl up. In theory they should have been issued with office keys, alas, this was fouled up somewhere so I'm having to show them how to break into the office.... (ie phone me)

Got phone call from my sister asking what I'd like for my birthday. I asked for some peace and quiet. Instead I got exactly the opposite 8/
I can think of a large number of reasons to be back in the UK right about now. Actually I can think of a pharmacy I want to go get some headache tablets from.

Moved the BryceCam for telsa's convience so that she could make sure that _A_ was working and not having a party without her in the US.

Took _A_/bcrl/Al Viro off to Ruby Tuesdays for lunch. Many kernel hacking discussions. In a blinding moment of insanity, paid for everyone's lunch.

Back at the office, the kernel hacking became darker and more ritualistic,.. lights started to go out (-> 1/2 lighting) a set of speakers were tiched up to a box for the music, and a number of chickens were sacraficed to the gods in the hope that it would fix the kernel memory corruption problems.

Mark Cox called up asking for a lift to the airport, so went and ran him out there. Caught up on some of the more fun business unit problems that are in the air at the moment. He won't be back till Thursday. Mind you he did bribe me with a bar of tolberone chocolate 8)

Arjan showed up shortly after this (don't use the almost black chickens..) and I spent a merry 1/2 hr allocating a desk and computer for him to use. Decided that he probably didn't want the japanesse language install that was already on the machine. Reinstalled the latest software tree on the machine for him to abuse. (hur hur hur)

Later on we went out for an Indian meal. Immeadiately we got outside bcrl had a brainstorm (and minor swearing session) as he figured out yet another possible bug that might be in the initrd section of the kernel. He ranted a bit then we bundled him in the car and drove off to the indian where it was all dicussed over the meal. Was at the indian for about 2 hours.

Back at the office more hacking on the kernel, bcrl busy with the bootmem problem, myself with the alpha deadlock problem _A_ with various patchs for the next ac kernel patch, al viro working on the everything will be a filesystem personal project he has.

Busy busy busy day.

Saturday

Nothing special about the morning happened (apart from waking up which is always considered a mistake)

Wandered into the office to continue to trackdown and destroy the network deadlock bug in the alpha kernel that the i386 guys plagued me with <growl>

Mark rang me at the office asking if I'd like to go out eat and I arranged for him to come over meet me at the office before heading out. Just after I put the phone down, _A_ walked around the corner. Pleasantries exchanged. Then I find out that bcrl is due to arrive about 2 hrs later. So when Mark arrived, all the plans had changed substantially. Oops. Fortunately Mark didn't mind.

Showed _A_ a nice pcmcia explosion (null pointer derefeance). Now fixed. Asked _A_ for an opinion on the alpha networking deadlock problem I'd been experianceing. He's bewildered by it's obscurity.

bcrl finally turned up and a few other RHAT straggers at work came along to go have food at Neo-china in Religh. _A_ discovered for future referance that ordering 4 spring rolls is a mistake as they were a shade smaller than the size of a coke can each 8)
I opted for the hungarian beef. Very nice and not too expensive either.

Ran everyone back to their home destinations afterwards, arranging with _A_ and bcrl to let them in the office at 10:30 tomorrow. Went back to the office to beat on the alpha kernel a bit more (very frustrating).

Friday

Most of the day has been used up in rebuilding kernels trying to find out where this deadlock bug occurs

(Strace fragment follows)

munmap(0x20000020000, 8192)             = 0
writev(3, ptrace: umoven: Input/output error 0x11ffff3f0,
1)               = 12
fcntl(3, F_GETFL)                       = 0x2 (flags
O_RDWR|O_LARGEFILE)
fcntl(3, F_SETFL, O_RDWR|O_NONBLOCK)    = 0
read(3, 0x11ffff4a0, 8)                 = -1 EDEADLK
(Resource deadlock avoided)

The major problem being that it affects sending xterms to other machines (evel itself if -display localhost:0) and prevents netscape/mozilla from browsing the web though lynx works.

This bug is just so bizzare. It seems to affect X11 communications, netscape and mozilla and nothing else yet I know this is a kernel bug (old kernel works, new kernel breaks the behavior) I'm hand applying all the changes the i386 kernel team made one at a time until I find the one that knackers the kernel in the above fashion. It's time consuming, and I'll have to come in tomorrow to finish it.

Thursday

Turns out that the problems I'd seen with the newer adaptec driver over the old one are related to the driver being a bit lax in ensuring that it didn't generate interrupts until the driver was fully setup. Also affects the Intel universe, not just the alpha. Apparently theres a newer driver available that we should be using.

Unfortunately it looks like it might be a bit late to do anything about that in CVS. I'll have to talk to Michael about updating it if possible.

Headache,.. went home

Wednesday

More and more fun as the alpha fights back.
Still seeing the SMP blow up on boot. When I boot the newer kernels what seems to be happening is that they'll fail on the first boot and a soft reset will allow them to boot fine. I suspect someting isn't being initialized correctly at boot time. The only annoyance I have with this is that the oops log is fairly long (about 22 8digit hexadecimal numbers, and copying them down from the screen onto paper and then matching the symbols up with the adress ranges really, umm, sucks.

Oops,.. forgot it was my sisters birthday yesterday. Shame on me.

Tuesday

Not much happened today beyond merging various large patchs througout the night... and I mean a lot,.. when I'd finished I'd created 380K's worth of kernel patchs, 2 major restructurings 9 new configuration options, 1 revamping of the zerocopy patch and a cvs changelog that read like a comedy of errors.

Gone home to hide from Arjan.

Monday

Annexed the es40 from the QA group. It's now burried under a load of bright pink stickit notes warning of the *dire* consequences of interfering with it without approaching me first.

Tried to make do with the rebuilt dual dp264 with the 1Gb of RAM in it. Things were going ok for a while then 512Mb of the RAM went up in smoke. Deeply peeved. I have no idea what happened but between reboots one bank of ram died horribly. I'm upset about this as the machine was borrowed from API. I'm not quite sure what the story is for HW that fails when it's on long term loan. Obviously we'll replace the RAM but I have no idea who to talk to about getting the machine fixed.

Spent the rest of the day trying to make make sure it was just the RAM in the box that went the way off the blue vapour. Remeber folks, smoking HW can seriously damage your RAM... or something like that.

Sunday

Lazed around the apt for once..
Did some more laundry
Wandered into work, Only to discover that someone had reinstalled a test image over the top of the es40 I was using. ARGHH!

Sulked

Went home

Saturday

Woke up sort of late (11:00)

Did some tidying up of the apt, quick hoover of the carpets, laundry etc.

Made a concious effort to get down to Jordan Lake today to go strolling around. I got down there only to find quite a few notices slapped up all around the general area warning that west river nile virus has been detected in the area (nasty disease that causes inflamation of the brain and a horrible flu) and to take precautions with a FAQ sheet attached. Ummm.

Did bimble around a bit, took a few misc photo's