Older blog entries for halcy0n (starting at number 27)

Well, GCC 4 has finally be released. The changelog has all of the interesting stuff in it. Hopefully the work I have put towards making stuff in portage work with GCC4 has paid off. I'm going to see if more testers try unmasking it and report any bad breakages. Hopefully in the near future I can get a profile set up to unmask GCC4 and force people to use certain packages, instead of some people using glibc snapshots, and others not. Its a lot easier to debug this way I think.

I'll probably work on some Gentoo stuff on Sunday after I go rock climbing, and possibly tomorrow after the work on my Pascal- compiler. That project for my compilers class is turning into a real pain.

Well, I committed the new snapshot of GCC4 and a GCC4 fix for Dia. Everything seems to be working pretty well so far, and hopefully when GCC 4.0 finally gets released there will be a smooth transition. I'm still waiting on the Mozilla patches to get approved, which seem to be working perfectly fine for me, and I need to figure out how I can fix glibc to compile with GCC4, or I might just wait until the glibc maintainers make it compatible with GCC4, but I'm unsure when that is going to happen. Should be soon though.

Other hacking:

I also worked a bit on SnowWhite. I ripped out a lot of old useless code and some buggy stuff that shouldn't have been in there in the first place. I'm trying to clean up the code before adding any new features. There is some really nasty, atleast I think it is, stuff in there. I'm really not a big fan of macros and the entire linked list structure is a bunch of macros. I'm probably going to replace that with a C++ class, but it looks like it will be a lot of work to rip all of it out and put in the new structure. That'll be a nice first step to cleaning it all up though.

Well, I got the job. So I will be living on campus over the summer and working on my research project. I will be working on improving xGCC, adding functionality, making sure it works properly on test cases, seeing how well it works with other languages GCC supports, etc. There is a lot to do on it, and hopefully I can get a good deal of it done by the end of the summer and have an actual useful debugging tool. We hope to get it to the point where you can run it against chunks of the linux kernel and see if it can find any possible vulnerabilities. This should hopefully be possible by the end of the summer. It sounds like a very interesting project to me, and I hope I am able to do everything that is required of me.

I think its time that I started using Subversion for all of my personal projects, so I'm going to go and work on converting everything over into a Subversion repo. I hope that goes smoothly :)

Well, I may have just found myself what I consider to be a perfect summer job. I was looking through my email today, and I happened to actually look at the "Summer Research Opportunities" email on our cs-undergrads list at Stevens. The second one in the list sounded extremely interesting to me:

"The xGCC analysis tool verifies safety properties of the Extended Register Transfer Language (XRTL). These properties include buffer overflow, division by zero and the use of uninitialized variables and memory. XRTL is an assembler like intermediate language. The analysis tool can handle the low-level features like bit operations and byte access. Abstract interpretation is used for the analysis of XRTL. A new variant of the interval approximation is used for the abstraction of sets of registers and memory blocks. Widening/narrowing techniques are used to speed up the fixpoint computation for loops. xGCC consists of a modified GNU Compiler Collection (GCC) and an experimental analysis tool with graphical user interface.

The goal of this project is to improve the xGCC analysis tool with the goal to find flaws in a recent version of the linux kernel.

A student who is interested in this project should have good C++ programming skills. Preferably, the student should have previously worked on a project in a Unix development environment. Knowledge of an assembler language would be helpful in understanding XRTL."

It sounds exactly like what I am interested in, and it would help make my resume look better. I am supposed to meet with the person running the project tomorrow. Hopefully I can impress him and I get the job for the summer.

I finally set up my own blog. I'm probably going to be using that for everything I want to blog about, and crosspost some of the hacking stuff onto this blog. I set up the other blog in hopes that I will be interested in updating it enough to warrant asking to be put on Planet Gentoo. We'll see how all of that goes.

Gentoo: Well, the GCC4 branch has been frozen, so hopefully we will be seeing a release in the next month or so. I have almost everything compiling with GCC4, and it all seems to be going smoothly. Glibc is a big one that still needs to be fixed, but cvs head works for now, until they backport the changes to the 2.3 branch. Some media stuff still does not compile, and I have not had enough time to look closer into those issues.

Well, that's all for now. Got to go back to working on my project for my DB course...

I've been noticing more and more lately that there is a very strong stereotype that all Gentoo users are "ricers". From my experience, this is a small very vocal subset of our total users, and it upsets me that they have the ability to tarnish our image. I believe that Gentoo is a very usable distribution if you want to take some time and configure everything yourself, if not, it might not be for you at this point in time.

What I'm really curious about finding out right now is how many people actually use Gentoo in a production environment. I use it on my server to run my web/email and probably web and email for a couple of my friends' domains in the future. GLEP 19 looks like it would be a step in the right direction for creating an enterprise version of Gentoo, but it needs more support before it will ever be made into a reality. So, if you are using Gentoo in a production environment, if you could just shoot me an email telling me how its been working out, and what you are using it for, I'd be really interested in finding out how many people use the distro in this capacity.

Just got back from vacation the other day. Spent 5 days down in Florida. Very warm down there, it was a shock coming back up to NJ in shorts and it being only 50F out.

I've been working more on GCC4 porting issues for Gentoo. So far all has been going well and I haven't run into any major issues. My desktop seems to be perfectly stable running GCC4 and any patches I've backported from CVS or come up with myself.

I haven't been able to code on a new project I'm involved with because the Savannah approval process is taking incredibly long. Has anyone else had any problems with the process taking what seems to be ridiculously long? We are forking projects, 2 of which are already hosted on Savannah, so you wouldn't think it would take too long for them to check the code.

In other news, I finally got my server hosted at a colocation facility. They have had a few small issues getting the box working with their switch, but I believe all of that has been worked out now. My website should be hosted from my box in a few days, after I am sure everything is working fine.

I'm now an official Gentoo Linux developer. I'm specifically working on GCC porting, getting everything ready for when GCC4 comes out and making patches to fix any compile issues that might exist currently. I'm beginning to think that compilers is my little niche that I'm really interested in. I'm taking the class currently and its by far one of my most interesting classes I think. Well, if anyone is using Gentoo and wants to help me out with testing, you can get my GCC4 overlay and report back to me if those patches work. GCC4 isn't officially supported yet, so don't file bugs quite yet, but feel free to email me or contact me on IRC on Freenode.

Well, my patch for glibc got thrown away, since they don't seem to accept bugs for build errors. I understand that GCC 4 is not out yet, but it should be released sometime in the coming months, and if you can fix the problem before it goes mainstream, I would think that would be something that would be beneficial for them and the rest of the community. It wasn't a very radical change that needed to be applied. Oh well. Hopefully the Gentoo toolchain guys will apply it for me.

Gentoo: Well, my new developer bug was just picked up by a recruiter. I'm pretty excited to be getting involved with something I've enjoyed using for the past couple years. Just hope I don't break anything too badly :)

I should probably get back to work on my ER diagram for my database project though. Still trying to remember what all the different lines and extra lines and dashed lines mean. Atleast its not due until Thursday.