Older blog entries for Fefe (starting at number 19)

18C3 was way more fun than I expected. The two most frequenty asked questions to me were: "are you doing a web log again?" and "any more lectures from you today?". I was not planning on either, but the many questions made me write a web log (I still haven't uploaded it yet) and the second question made me feel bad for refusing to do more than two lectures this time.

Anyway, there were more than enough lectures this year, and good ones at that. I'm happy, this was the best CCC congress for years.

I'm very optimistic about 2002. It will be a great year, I'm sure. And tomorrow I will finally start writing that stupid LDAP server that I have been talking about for weeks. ;-)

Yesterday, I released fnord, a very small and very fast web server. It is quite feature complete and appears to be faster than most if not all other web servers out there.

I started a new project, mininet. I will reimplement certain important network utilities (so far only ping and host) using libowfat and the diet libc. I hope people will contribute (hint, hint) some code (wink, wink, nudge, nudge)!

Looks like I will be speaking about the diet libc at Linux Kongress! I hope that rivafb will have geforce2 go support until then so I can use a diet libc linked DFBPoint to do the presentation... well, maybe not.

HAL 2001 ruled!

Much progress! Linus told me that I should not use kernel headers from user space in the diet libc, so I cleansed the diet libc header files. It was quite a lot of ugly work, but it had to be done. Now, theoretically, you can cross-compile it without needing anything else (except gcc and binutils of course) from completely strange and alien platforms like cygwin/alpha or a PDP/11 ;)

Olaf got an ld.so for the diet libc working on x86, and it's only 7k! A little more cleaning up and I say we are ripe for one-dot-oh, baby!

What else is new? I resurrected my djbdns IPv6 patches and added full IPv6 transport capabilities, not only for tinydns but also for dnscache (which took a lot of messing with internal structures and resulted in a 70k patch). It would have taken weeks had I not been able to reuse code from libowfat. Whew.

openssl did link but had some problems. Now it passes the complete test suite. And we linked openssh. And boa. And GNU bash (with readline and history).

The diet libc is maturing quickly. Recently, we successfully linked busybox, ncurses, vim, openssl, fdisk, mount and umount against it. Olaf is moving forward nicely with the shared library loader, the pthreads appear to work fine,... I'm happy. Mandrakesoft has ported their installation floppies to it, saving lots of space in the process.

Olaf and I are thinking about starting a libstdc++ using libowfat as foundation. I wrote a few libowfat functions for this, and Olaf already did a test iostream cout that is just a hello world and it was below 3k although it contained buffering code!

I cleaned up the diet libc mess when cross compiling a little. I also added a wrapper for gcc, so now you can say diet gcc -o t t.c and it will add all the magic gcc options by itself. It will also work when you say diet sparc-linux-gcc -o t t.c and link against the sparc cross-compiled dietlibc.a. I hope that makes diet libc more accessible.

I'm driving to CeBIT tomorrow, so I released new versions of the diet libc and the embedded utils tonight. It's getting more complete by the day. Recent additions are crypt and get{pw,sp,gr}ent, so I can now link checkpassword against it - one of the few pieces of djb software that did not work until now.

I linked most of the services on www.fefe.de against the diet libc now, and the Apache is by far the largest remaining memory hog, so it needs to go. I need CGI, I need it to run in a chroot jail, and I need basic header rewriting capabilities. Let's see how far I get.

I am currently writing an article about MPLS for c't magazine, and they want it to be ready tomorrow noon. The text is largely ready, but I need to sketch some illustrations now.