Older blog entries for lgerbarg (starting at number 35)

Oh boy. Mac OS X was released man I have been busy playing with it. Did three things this weekend, but I have not quite finished anyway:

Synched /dev/random with the new stuff Mark M. did in FreeBSD, and made changes for the New OS X. I am panicking, but even the old patch is panicking with new kernel, it appears they changed some of the mutex/locking code and it is fouling me up.

I almost have Ben H.'s port of the NstBSD wavelan driver working with real PCMCIA wavelan cards under OS X. I can match and probe fine, but I seem to panic on trying to get an IO window. It might be a bug in my code, though I don't if the IOPCCard16Device code has ever been tested, so it could be a bug in the driver superclass.

I made a bunch of changes to IOBlockStorageDriver. I should have a working elevator sort in it sometime soon. The allocation routines are a complete hack, and it is not doing any of Elevator optimizations, but those should be easy to fix once I get it working.

Anyway, I seem to have started a bunch of the things on my todo list hopefully I should be able to close out random and the intial wavelan port later this week, then I can work on the elevator code and maybe get back to softupdates.

New TODO list:

  • Resync Darwin /dev/random with FreeBSD /dev/random and Mac OS X 1.0 (Darwin 1.3) -- will do this weekend once I have OS X Release
  • Write disk elevator code for Darwin
  • Finish softupdates port for Darwin
  • Reverse the infrared protocol for my Casio watch and write something that can dump my phone book from OS X to it ;-)
  • Write a module for iTunes for my Archos 6000 (Someone wrote a playlist generator, I get the impression it uses winamp format playlists, it should not be too hard)
  • Figure out how to adapt Ben H.'s new AirportDriver to work with both internal Apple card and wavelan's under Mac OS X
  • Finish paper for MacHack
  • Oh yeah I have a silly real job thing as well
Clearly I have way to much to do, anyone else want to do some of it ;-)

Well, I am a Darwin Developer finally. Apple offered to make me one in December, but because of a lot complexities it did not happen until Feb 19th (the day afetr my 21st birthday ;-).

The details have not quite entirely worked themselves out (I have not gotten a chance to exchange my ssh key for CVS access, and my name is not up on the page yet), but it feels good.

I got teTeX up and running on OS X the other day. I was writing a paper in it, and got sick of scping it over to a solaris box. I will probably put the port on anoncvs.opensource.apple.com when I do get my cvs access working ;-)

Oh, I am presenting at MacHack. I really should make more frequent updates, they would be smaller.

ARGH!

Oh boy. It has been forever since I have written. I did some cool stuff in the last month, but I don't think I am going to get to any of it in this entry. I am in a kind of wierd position.

I have an airport basestation, and moved to a new apartment over break. Since I have not had DSL installed yet I decided to use it to dial into my universities modem bank. As it turns out the thing only works with a couple of premade modem scripts Apple provides, none of which were suitable. I sat down, and hacked the image around and figured out how to write my own. It works and I am happy.

Normally I would pass this kind of info on to other people (like the guy who wrote airport configurator), but I am in a really awkward spot. For various reasons I am being sent some NDA materials from apple. I have not signed the forms yet, but I have every intention of doing so. I have not seen anything I should not have, and the stuff that I am getting involved with has nothing to do with the airport stuff, but it could be messy. To top it off Apple is flying me out for an on campus interview later this month.

Not quite sure what I should do with the info I figured out. I sent an email to my primary contact at Apple to see what he thinks.

Well, it is really busy around here, end of the semester and all.

I started a port of FreeBSDs new random driver to Darwin. Currently it builds, runs, and panics. I think that is because I just converted the mutex calls, and there are apparently some semantic differences. Particularly FreeBSD supports recursive mutexes, and it appears that mach does not. I have a way to fix it, I just need some time, hopefully tomorrow or over the weekend.

So much work, so little sleep

Well, I am in Philadelphia for Thanksgiving. I was surprised I when I saw this story about ZDnet. Or more exactly I was surprised that it mentioned the /dev/random port I had done. Too bad, since that code will not be integrated, and my rewrite is a while off still, but it certainly brightened my evening a little.

My ufs work on darwin is coming along nicely, it can read and write files, though it panics when I write directories. I decided to install Darwin Intel finally so that I could have a remote debugging machine. It is currently getting past the first stage booter, and the framebuffer appears to be unhappy, I kind of expected that though...

I wiped out a drive on that machine to install Darwin, and wanted to transfer some file from it to another box first. Boy was I shocked that the md5's did not match, then I determined the Mac OS X's md5 is broken (it reports incorrect, though self-consistent sums), so I made a working copy, and submitted a bug report.

So now after two notable detours I am almost back to working on ufs. Maybe I will try to get my tulip working while I am at it, for right now I am just going to to use an EtherExpress.

3 Nov 2000 (updated 3 Nov 2000 at 18:45 UTC) »

It has been a good week:

  • Apple was on campus, had an interview with them, which went well
  • Apple called me the next day, some people in Cupertino had independently seen my resume, and want to call me up for a phone screening
  • Bought an answering machine so I don't miss potential job related calls
  • Got my pay checks for the last 2 months (thankyou screwed up paperwork
  • Bought an AirPort base station
  • Bought a firewire zip drive
  • Work on Darwin softupdates progresses, even if it is slowly

I suppose that is about everything. The zip drive lets me have a nice test ground to fiddle with new fs code. It also lets me find new and amusing ways to panic the kernel (hot removal seems to have some issues...)

Still trying to catch up with everything that happened while I was away at BSDcon. I am almost caught up which means I can get back to working on useful things. Here are things that I intend to get some work on in the near future, in no particular order:

  • Port Soft Updates to Darwin
  • Redo the random code using either FreeBSDs or zeroknowledge's Yarrow implementation
  • Look into porting ipfilter to Darwin
  • Get Darwin x86 running on one one of my local machines
  • Migrate to FreeBSD-current on another
  • Migrate my systems to rackmount enclosures

Not sure about the last one, it is one of those things I always claim I am going to do, but never seem to get around to. Some of things on that list are definately not going to happen in the near future. Hopefully while I am doing work on some of them other people will do the some of them (well, if someone paid for everything to move my systems to rackmount I might be able to make the time to do everything else on my list ;-)

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