Older blog entries for kroah (starting at number 39)

Licensing stuff
Wow, I never thought I would be arguing licensing issues on any mailing list, let alone lkml. The whole thing got started on the LSM mailing list with this posting.

Time to go write some code to clense myself...

Hotplug

The Hotplug PCI driver is coming along nicely. The new structures for the core code look workable and should enable others to implement their drivers quite easily (others in this context is probably me...)

Did just find out about the "Atlas" project that Intel and other companies are working on. It's like PCI Hotplug, but think of adding and removing entire PCI busses at once. Hope it works out to something that actually is useful.

USB

Well, I'm the current Linux USB maintainer for a bit, while the "real" maintainer takes a vacation and gets settled into a new job. Previously when I have been the temporary maintainer, big, contriversial patches have been sent in (HID happened, along with a big usb-uhci vs. uhci debate), but so far it's been pretty smooth...

Unless you count the whole "swap over USB devices" debate :)
Sony Clie USB
Yeah, got all of the USB Clie devices now working! Just sent off a patch, which should show up in the next -ac kernel. Now all Palm OS USB devices are supported on Linux, it's about time :)

Now to get pilot-link to work with the Palm 4.0 USB protocol properly...

Linux Hotplug

Released a small "dietHotplug" package that implements the /sbin/hotplug functionality in a C program instead of the current linux-hotplug scripts. Huge size savings!

I did this not to replace the current scripts, which are still necessary for a system to work with different kernels, and are much easier to add new hooks and do other fun scripting things with, but because the 2.5 kernel initrd structure will need it. Think loading only the pci drivers for the devices that you have in the system at boot time. That is what dietHotplug is good for.

Embedded systems / rescue boot discs might find it handy, if they don't want to have a version of bash or awk on their system to still be able to do hotplug stuff.

And it was fun to write, which was the biggest reason for doing it :)
Sony Clie USB
Finally got my first report of a Clie 710 working with my Linux kernel driver. Made me very happy (hint, a short note to a open source developer about how their code works great for you is a very nice thing to do.) Also got the patch into 2.4.8-ac10 so that it should get a lot more widespread testing. I have gotten lots of reports of it not working, so there is something going on here. I'm still waiting for Sony to get back to me after my last round of questions.

OLS

Finally signed all of the GPG keys that I got at the keysigning party and pushed them out to the keyservers. Took me forever.

Put up my slides and paper of my talk right here.

Had such a good time, I need to think up another paper topic so I can go next year...

Kernel stuff

Finding someone to review my PCI Hotplug patch has been very difficult. No one wants to read through 9,000 lines of code, and I don't blame them... I'll get it into the kernel tree eventually, at least it's in Red Hat's latest kernels in their 7.2 beta.

Been doing lots of other little USB patches for different things. It seems that people are actually using the usb-skeleton.c driver to base their USB drivers on, so I've been getting some very strange emails about bugs in drivers that I have never heard of before.
OLS
Very fun so far. Nice to see people who you have only known by email. I give a talk on Linux Hotplugging stuff in a few minutes. Hopefully no one will come to see it :) Or if they do, at least they can ask some good questions. Talks without feedback aren't that much fun.
Wireless is great. I need to get this set up for my house.
Hotplug PCI
Been working a bunch on the Linux kernel driver for this lately. Released another patch based on comments from some people. Only one major thing left to do to it before I try to get it into the kernel tree.

Linux USB

Been doing lots of little patches lately. Nothing major.

I did get a signed NDA from Sony back that should now let me get some information from them on how they have implemented the USB interface in their Clie devices. This is good.

Now if only the Pilot Link people would get their m500 and m505 code checked into the tree, I can stop answering all of this email that I'm getting with "They are working on it." :)

OLS

Finally got my plane ticket. Just saw that they are going to be having a keysigning party so I might finally get someone to sign my GPG key...
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 :)
4 Jun 2001 (updated 4 Jun 2001 at 20:23 UTC) »
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...

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