Older blog entries for kroah (starting at number 34)

new hardware

Yumm...
Funny thing is that my bios doesn't detect some things that Linux handles just fine. Had to upgrade my old util-linux package to get access to the whole disc, but that was the only problem. My eyes are thanking me.

USB Clie support on Linux

I'm actually talking with someone from Sony about this. Now they want me to sign an NDA. I gave my stock, "Sure, as long as I can write a driver released under the GPL with the information learned." and they weren't phased at all. Should be interesting to see how it all turns out. Hopefully better than hacker's Sony experience.

ols

Gotta get a plane ticket and start writing my slides up. Procrastination is good :)

StackGuard

Spent some time trying to build the latest version of glibc (2.2.2) with the StackGuard compiler. After some stupid things that I was doing were finally made apparent, the build progressed nicely until it hit the sunrpc code. Lovely core dumps all over the place.

sigh Someday the StackGuard compiler will be forward ported to the latest gcc code base. If I get sufficiently bored, maybe I should take a look at it. Hey, the ProPolice people have their version of StackGuard running on 2.96, how hard could it be? :)

work

I left WireX a week ago, and am now working for IBM. What a contrast in the two companies, the internal commitment to Linux that IBM has is amazing. I would have never guessed, and this should be a fun job (basically getting paid to do the things I was doing on my own anyway...)

USB

Lots of little things need to be cleaned up. The flaws in the usb-serial drivers keep getting pointed out (the SMP locking is all b0rked) so I will spend some time this week sorting it all out.

I wrote a small usb-skeleton.c driver and got lots of good review by a few people on how I messed up the SMP locking on it (any common thread here?...) The usb-skeleton.c driver was written as an example for others, and a good excuse to keep putting off a LJ article that I finally finished about Linux USB drivers. Hope it turned out ok, it seemed pretty messy.

Hotplug PCI

Compaq supprised me with a machine to test out the hotplug PCI patches with. It's a very impressive piece of hardware. I finally got it all set up, and now have quite the room heaters :) I need to work on the drivers a bunch this week also, luckily my day job allows this.

survived that, now onward to new stuff...

tomorrow is not going to be a fun day...

Wee, got the Hotplug PCI driver working on my box.
Now to attack it with a big stick...

OLS

Finished my paper late last night. Glad to see it done, hopefully some people find it interesting. Now to postpone writing my presentation till the last minute also :)

work

It really sucks to see a good, talented, person let go for no good reason. And of course management explained it all very badly. I hope they realize what they did when all of their Windows machines need something and there's no one to help them. Of course I feel extra bad, as I had pointed the job out to him in the first place a year ago :( Now who do I get to bother when the server's disc is full?

USB

Received a new USB 2.0 card. Looks real nice, hopefully I'll get some time now that my paper is done to hack on it. Also have to get this hotplug PCI driver working soon too, I hate cleaning up NTisms in Linux drivers.

Should be an "interesting" month...

gotta get working on my paper for OLS...time is running out...

Now I remember why I like writing code instead of documents :)

Lots of things done, lots of places gone to, and yet...

Finally made my room reservations for OLS and now I have to finish this paper by the end of the month.

Got a kick butt machine from VA Linux to do some HotPlug PCI development work, trying to tie it into the Linux Hotplug core.

Now to go figure out where I am going to get some spare time in the upcomming months...

long time no post....

USB on the Tyan Tiger 133 motherboard

I have been working for a while with Randy Dunlap on getting the onboard USB controller (a VIA chip) on this motherboard to work in SMP mode. All that we could get was in noapic mode, which isn't the best. Anyway, after loads of emails back and forth, I drug the machine to the local "Advanced Topic Workshop" put on by our local LUG (actually the monitor was the pain, the machine was easy to carry) and we sat in the corner of the room, and I let Randy loose on the box. After a few hours, and me learning lots more about SMP interrupts and APIC mode than I knew, he gave up.

Seems that even if the machine would work in APIC mode with the USB controller, so many pins are not connected to the APIC controller that there wouldn't be even much benifit to run in that mode.

So in summary, if you have this motherboard, use a 2.4.x kernel, and add "noapic" to the boot line, and things should be fine. And don't buy this board if you have a choice :)

But Linux does better than Win2000 in this regard, they don't support this configuration at all!

Linux-Hotplug

Also, I'm having fun working on the scripts for the Linux-Hotplug project. I'm going to be giving a talk about linux-hotplug at the Ottawa Linux Symposium this year, so I need to get working on that paper...

Bitkeeper

Been using Bitkeeper a bunch lately in my work to port SubDomain to the 2.4.x kernel. Very impressed with it. Like it lots better than cvs, but then that might not be a fair comparison :)