What's Happening At RustCorp?

Rusty's (new) GPG Key

Rusty is now working for IBM.

Thanks to WatchGuard Inc, and later Linuxcare. for funding the netfilter and other work; they are very cool.

Thursday December 20 2001

Saw some code which didn't use cpu_to_le32() et. al, so I added it to the Unreliable Guide to Kernel Hacking. Weird though, it actually evoked a response from Linus.

Shot off a new proc patch, and a new per-cpu patch just before going on holidays. Hopefully this way I can avoid the mindless drivel which follows any /proc work...

Thursday December 13 2001

Reworking my "replacement for current /proc of shit" patch to become a "replacement for current sysctl of shit" patch. Not as cool sounding, but more accurate. Andi Kleen believes that dentries and inodes are too large for an in-memory filesystem though, but Linus and Al Viro like this approach (although it requires deeper understanding of the dcache than writing a "normal" filesystem).

And I'm finally updating the Hotplug CPU kernel patch, to integrate it into my patch collection, at the prompting from guys doing the hard work (the S390 and ia64 hotplug CPU authors).

Wednesday December 12 2001

Phew: I'm glad I rewrote some of those EMails so many times to remove the vitriol, as I received Alan and Telsa's Christmas card & gift for when they stayed with us earlier this year.

To quote one of brighter IBMers I've met:

The flaming doesn't really bother me. I take it as evidence that people care deeply about getting the right solution. And the fact that (most) people don't seem to hold grudges is a very good thing. I will take a technically competent curmudgeon over a cheery and polite airhead any day of the week!

Alan wants to rewrite the scheduler. I'm glad he's not trying to maintain 2.4 at the same time then (scheduling, like VM, is among those things I categorize as "too hard").

Tuesday December 11 2001

Started a bit of a flame to see an Intel-specific scheduler patch go into the kernel. I've been playing with Anton on the scheduler to support HMT, and the several approaches we've tried have revealed that it's harder than it looks. Hence my recent work on Mike Kravitz's multi-queue scheduler, and my abject surprise at a patch which, at first blush, does nothing useful.

It all comes down to the way they number their CPUs; we never had the problems they saw, mainly though luck: we number our real CPUs 0-3, and their shadows 4-7. They seem to use the lower bit to differentiate them, although I don't understand Intel APIC stuff.

Monday December 3 2001

On the return from Linux Kongress, and the first Netfilter Workshop which Harald Welte organized. I think we have a good idea on what will happen in 2.5, most of which already exists in patch form (although not all in patch-o-matic).

Friday November 30 2001

Stupid Rusty. Last idea for dcache won't work at all, since we can't make a tree into a one-based reference count system very easily (the rule with the normal one-based refcnt system is that by the time it's decremented to zero, there are no pointers to it). This needs much more thought and some experiment.

Maybe I do need to use a stale pointer after all... Hmmm...

Saturday November 24 2001

Anton's been hitting the dcache lock in d_lookup as a bottleneck in benchmarking. Unfortunately, while this can be made into a read-write lock (one lock for the lru list, and a read/write for everything else), that doesn't help: the problem is not contention on the lock itself, but simply the act of dirtying the lock cacheline. This is the same penalty whether it is a readlock or a writelock, and it's only going to get worse with newer chips and larger SMP systems.

The problem is that there are two kinds of refcounting in the kernel:

  1. In "atomic_dec_and_lock" locking (zero-based locking), things with zero refcount can be accessible, hence we need to grab the lock to protect them if we drop them to zero. This is used in the dcache and other filesystem code. In "atomic_dec_and_test" locking (one-based locking), things with zero refcount are unreachable (dead), hence no lock required. This is used heavily in the networking code.
We already know how to turn one-based locking into RCU locking, so the readers don't need to have a lock. However, this is not possible with zero-based locking. It took me some time to realize the inherent difference between, say, the dcache and the route cache, with some help from Al Viro.

The dcache fills a dual function: it has "live" entries which are referred to as working directories, open files, etc, and it has "cached" entries which are kept around for efficiency. The first set is fairly easily mapped to a one-based locking system, the second set needs a separate mechanism, giving us a layering like:
In-use Dentries
Recently Used (but not live) Dentry Cache
Filesystem
Now, we can make the first set a fairly straight-forward one-based locking system, ie. no locks on d_lookup if we every dentry is live. The second is a little trickier: we can use a simple hash by parent pointer and name, IF we always kick children out of the cache before parents (if we kicked parents out first, then loaded it in again, we would have a cached entry with the wrong parent pointer, meaning it wouldn't be found in a cache search). This makes the dentry cache flushing mechanism a little trickier, but we know how to do fast threaded lookups on this kind of thing (I don't think we can use RCU here, but we can definitely do lock-per-hash-chain).

Now I have to implement and benchmark. Personally, I think this is simpler than what we have now, but I'm used to one-based locking from the network stuff...

Wednesday November 21 2001

Argh. Spent a good couple of days playing with testing my patches, doing compiles using Virtual Anton to test them, making my "lkpatch" script work properly for (slightly) intelligent kernel patching, etc.

Progress is slow, but I want a complete set of tested patches out before I go on Friday. Could be long nights between now and then.

Sunday November 18 2001

Spent the weekend away visiting Alli's brother, so haven't put anything up on my ftp.kernel.org page yet. Thanks to HPA for that: I've been looking for a place to keep my growing number of kernel patches, and that's the logical spot.

Of course, the real reason for the ftp.kernel.org acct is that Wired, listed me as one of "Linus' Inner Circle" (I'd never read Wired before, and I don't think I've missed much: the article was fine, but the magazine as a whole is a bit too k00l for my pedestrian tastes).

Preparing for Linux Kongress next week (I leave on Friday) is going to mean this is not going to be a very productive few days, which sucks.

Friday November 16 2001

More tweaking of Virtual Anton; Anton wanted to say "arch i386 only", which didn't work. Doesn't quite work yet, but it will soon, with a bit of a rewrite.

Wednesday November 14 2001

Anton told me that the Sparc64 has to go back to Sun tomorrow. So I'm in late tonight getting the new module code working on Sparc64 (very slow work: this is an old Ultra 5 we're talking about).

Tuesday November 13 2001

I proposed to Alli on the weekend. She said yes 8).

The papers coming in for linux.conf.au are looking really good: lots of local people doing cool things I had no idea were being done. I'm starting to really look forward to it.

Released a tested fix for tcpdumping while doing NAT. This should work better than my last (untested, very buggy, got in 2.4.15-pre2) patch.

Monday November 12 2001

After months of erum... planning... FHS 2.3 mailing list has moved. I'll announce the official kickoff to the new list (and a reminder to the old list) later in the week.

Friday October 26 2001

Virtual Anton now works, and is getting more useful as things are slowly tweaked. The following is the result of mailing "do help" to Virtual Anton:

From: Virtual Anton <vanton@ozlabs.au.ibm.com>
Date: Friday, 26 Oct 2001 10:23:17 +1100
To: Rusty Russell <rusty@rustcorp.com.au>
Subject: Re:  do help
X-Virtual-Anton: Virtual Sex God
Message-Id: <20011112231538.3887717F33@haven.ozlabs.ibm.com>

Here is the latest help text
Virtual Anton says: Help?  How can I help when I'm trapped in a shell script!

Welcome to Virtual Anton! Version 0.99

Virtual Anton is a mail gateway for (currently Linux Kernel)
patches, which does all the grunt-work of patching, compiling,
testing and benchmarking the results.  Virtual Anton runs on a
server, and controls machines as listed in "~vanton/conf/machines".

EMail to vanton contains various commands and (usually) a patch.  Commands
are searched for in the Subject line, then the body of the message.

Options are specified in the EMail as follows:

  First everything in the Subject line and message body is broken
  into sentences, separated by full stops, commas or semicolons.

  The each sentence is is evaluated:

    If it contains no, don't, dont, or do not, then the sense
    of the line is negated.

    If it contains skip, ignore, disable, deactivate or avoid,
    followed by the option name, it is set to NO (unless
    negated above).

    If it contains build, enable, activate, add or do,
    followed by the option name, it is set to YES (unless
    negated above).

Examples:

  "do not build ppc" => ppc = NO

  "disable ppc" => ppc = NO

  "don't enable i386, ppc" => ppc = UNKNOWN (it's on a sentence by itself)

  "do not ignore ppc" => ppc = YES


The incoming EMail passes through these stages:

Firstly, if the message contains a "help" parameter (eg. "do
help"), these docs are generated and sent to the user, and nothing
else is done.

Otherwise, for every machine which is not set as NO in the EMail, we want to
build a kernel.

We look in the conf/<machinename>/kerneltree file to see
what the preferred kernel tree(s) is for that machine: they
are tried in order until the patch applies to one and it
compiles, or we run out.

We use the scripts/update-kernel script gathers the latest of that
tree: to add a new tree, modify this script.

The currently available kernel trees are:

  haven::ppc64_smp: The OzLabs PPC64 tree, rsyncing the latest from
    haven::ppc64_smp for patching against.

  alan-cox: This refers to the Alan Cox tree: rsyncing the
    appropriate patch from proxy.

  linus-pre: This refers to the Linus pre-patches: rsyncing
    the appropriate patch from proxy.

  development: The latest Linus kernel (including odd numbered).

  stable: The latest Linus kernel with an even second digit.

  2.2: The latest 2.2 series kernel.

  [1-9].*.*: This refers to the any other Linus kernel: patches from
    the previous version are rsync'ed from proxy.

For each patched tree, we copy in conf/<machinename>/config, then append
override it using any lines in the EMail beginning with "CONFIG".

Then we feed a set of carriage returns into
conf/<machinename>/make to actually build the kernel.

If a kernel was successfully built for a machine, it is
then tested on that machine, in the background.
First we grab a lock on the machine (to avoid running against other
benchmarks and tests).  This can take some time if there is a
queue.

The kernel is then installed on the machine, using the script in
conf/<machinename>/install.

We check that noone is on the machine, using the "w" command: if
there is, the install fails and we send the w output back to the
user.

The boot time required is given (in seconds) in conf/<machinename>/boottime.

We ssh into the machine and run "sudo /sbin/reboot".  This means
vanton must have an account on that machine, the ssh keys must be
set up, and we must have permission to run /sbin/reboot via sudo.

Then we transfer most of the Virtual Anton home dir to the machine
(includes the original EMail in tmp/).

Then we run all the tests in ~vanton/tests/ which begin with a
digit, saving the output of each one.

After the tests are run for the machine, we then see if benchmarks
are suppressed in general, (benchmarks NO), or "benchmarks on/for
<machinename>".  If they are suppressed, we stop here.

Otherwise we run all the benchmarks in ~vanton/benchmarks/ which
begin with a digit.

If a benchmark succeeds, the output is handed to
scripts/save_benchmark to store in the report subdirectory.  This
script must be customized for each benchmark.  So far:

  dbench results are recorded in full in
  dbench-<num>.<machinename>.html, and the final line (the
  interesting one), is appended to dbench.list.<machinename>.

  Other benchmarks are not saved, and must be added to the
  scripts/save_benchmark script.


All these machine tests are happening in the background: if no
kernels were successfully built, for any machine, we simply mail
back that we failed.

Otherwise, we run scripts/create_index, which produces the
index.html from all the scripts/save_benchmark outputs, and/or
failure reports, in the report directory.

So far, we only support dbench results: edit scripts/create_index for others.

If there were any failures, we mail the output of them back to the
user.

Otherwise we simply reply to the user with the URL of the benchmark
results.

Good luck using Virtual Anton!

Thursday October 4 2001

Pulling an all-nighter playing with my config optimizer. Alli's working night shift tonight.

Virtual Anton is getting closer to reality.

Sunday September 23 2001

A whole week on the new module code! Luxury!

Monday September 10 2001

First day at IBM today, finally joining most of the ex-Linuxcare guys. More work on disparate projects to follow in the next few weeks, on my Titanium Powerbook (finally running non-x86).

Good to be working with my peers again.

Tuesday August 28 2001

Was talking to VA last month, and was stunned and disappointed that they are becoming a proprietary software company (ie. they are trying to get rid of their professional services arm, leaving proprietary software as their only revenue source). How ever much you spin this, it's a fundamental shift from a Free Software company to yet another company which uses Free Software to launch its own products.

Now they've opened the door, it'll be interesting to see how far down the path they go. As Raymond says, it's easy to sell proprietary software...

Wednesday August 15 2001

I've been working full time (and then some) on the Election System; it's going pretty well for a software project.

But after the debacle with auditing the masquerading pppoe bug (two audits, a pile of bug reports and a user reporting that commenting out one call fixed the problem, and I still didn't find the bug), I've handed the responsibility for netfilter kernel patches to Harald Welte.

I've joined Alan Cox's boycott of US conferences, not that that's hard at the moment, with no time for travel and no conferences in the US that I want to attend.

Finally got a change to clear my inbox today, for the first time in months. That feels good.

And you know that EMail about an interactive web page for the Linux Kernel Graph? He was interested enough to offer to pay me to create it, so I'll be spending weekends on that for a while. Results should be cool if you have enough disk space to host it 8).

Wednesday July 18 2001

Usually I don't mention this in my diary, but Alli has been sick recently, so with that and no longer being paid to hack on Linux, I've been falling way behind in netfilter stuff.

Tuesday July 10 2001

OK, I've been busy with all kinds of non-netfilter things, and there's been some troubled noises in the netfilter camp. However, I'm pretty happy to let Harald run with the ball, since he's doing so well.

However, I've got my in-kernel module linker ported to i86 (trivial), PPC (tricky) and Ultrasparc (easy) so far. I want Alan Modra to get ELF sections working in PPC-64's gcc, so I can get the PPC-64 port done. Then, the world! Bwaahahaha....

Someone sent mail asking if there was a web site where you can zoom in on the Linux Kernel Graph interactively. I replied with my rough sketch of how I would write such a thing. Wonder if I'll ever hear from them again?

Monday June 11 2001

Public holiday here today: took some time to look at User Mode Linux, which seems like a good way to test my in-kernel module linker for x86.

Looked at using the RCU stuff to speed up the dentry code: the first step is to get rid of the lock_kernel() Big Kernel Lock which still haunts these code paths, then we should be able to start cooking dbench. I thought someone had already done this, but I couldn't find it in a cursory search.

Monday June 4 2001

Long time, no write. I'm working on the Australian Capital Territory's Electronic Voting and Counting System for a while. It's a bit different for me, but they say a change is as good as a holiday.

Hey, and Thinkgeek started selling the Linux Kernel Graph . Cool, only it's kept improving since the one they did (and it's much faster than it was: only 100 minutes on my laptop now).

Monday May 14 2001

linux.conf.au 2002 looks to be on a good track, but with a date of early February, it's going to get tight...

Talking with Anand Kumria, the subject of a Global Installfest came up: wonder if anyone is interested?

Friday May 11 2001

Tomorrow early I head for Brisbane to meet the organizers of linux.conf.au 2002. Then I'm back for about 24 hours before heading to Portland, Oregon for a few days.

I'm hoping this travel doesn't interfere with the work I'm doing on module loading (in-kernel linking, learning a lot about ELF). I want to see what the solution looks like: FreeBSD have an in-kernel linker. It is hard to imagine that it would be as horrible as the locking in the current module code.

I'm writing the i386 version first, then I'll try PPC and PPC64: this is in order of difficulty. Particularly since it's going to be fun to test for subtle bugs (eg. exception tables not working).

Saturday May 5 2001

Late night: IRC meeting at 1am. It went fairly well; was quite small. Good to see all the netfilter members there, and Harald said he's put the logs online somewhere.

Continuing to work on Read Copy Update mainly. Anton showed a 2-3% improvement on dbench (3GB 4way PPC) by getting rid of the read lock on fget().

For those interested, see my new random kernel hacks page .

Saturday April 28 2001

2.4.4 is out: recommended upgrade for anyone using the netfilter FTP module, or running SMP.

Monday April 16 2001

I am in Tehran. Medical emergency forced landing in Iran, and trying to sort out the takeoff (Lauda do not usually land here) took the flight crew over maximum hours, so we're in a hotel.

Wish I had time to see more of the place: went for a quick walk in the area around the hotel, but we're going back soon. The Australian Consul (Michael Lynch) said he assumed that Tehran University has a computer science department: but is there a Linux User Group? And I have to come back, as I owe the him 20,000 of the local currency.

Saturday April 14 2001

Spoke at Aberystwyth, spent Friday sightseeing and hanging out with Gareth and the others (which was great fun), and Gareth drove me to Sheffield this morning to speak to the Sheffield Linux User Group . Which is above and beyond the call of duty: I hope his car makes it all the way back OK.

So many things to do when I get back.

Wednesday April 11 2001

Spent a couple of days in Amsterdam, and visited the VA offices in The Hague; caught up with Wichert Akkerman, with whom I had dinner, several beers and lots of geek talk later I think we'd covered just about everything you can imagine. From travelling too much to such nebulous topics such as "Where Will Debian Go?". It was really fun, probably the highlight of .nl for me.

Someone has enhanced the hotplug-CPU patch, and made fixes (including my missing copy_from_user() which Anton found before). Expect Anton or I to post an update soon.

Spent most of the day travelling to Aberystwyth (15 minutes learning how to say it: ab-ber-ist-with). Looking forward to getting home, now. I must be getting old.

Saturday April 7 2001

Now I'm in Santiago, Spain, at Xuventude Galicia Net , which is a big conference/BYO-machine gathering. Lots of cool stuff is happening here, such as coding competitions, etc. My tutorial here went pretty well: there were no translators here (unlike Madrid Linux Expo), so I added more annotations (most computer people can read English far better than listen to it), and it seemed to work pretty well: I preferred it over the Madrid talk, anyway. More questions, and that always makes me feel more useful.

Netfilter-wise, I tested the conntrack race patch, but I only have my laptop, so it's not a good test. I also have a fix for mtr, which is in testing. The Brits haven't gotten back to me with travel arrangements, so it looks like I won't be going to the UK after all. I'm kind of looking forward to getting home, anyway.

Wednesday March 14 2001

Well, I'm in Rome, hacking the network code while Alli catches up on sleep. I've had two of those great Italian coffees, so I'm wide awake. ("No, no! No americano! Espresso! Si!").

Our rough itinerary is as follows:

  1. March 16th, leave Roma for Firenze, Venizia, Padova, Milano.
  2. April 3rd, train from Milano to Madrid, Spain for LinuxWorld.
  3. April 5th, Alison flies to Vienna and home to .au, I fly to Santiago Spain, do various talks (Santiago Garcia Mantinan <manty@udc.es> is arranging stuff).
  4. April 14th or so, speak somewhere in Sheffield, UK, and Aberystwyth, Wales. This part is really hazy still, but hopefully someone will get me flight information and I can turn up at the right place and time.
I always feel really bad asking for LUGs to find money to pay flights, but it's just easier: trying to book reasonably-priced stuff from Australia is basically impossible (I don't want to pay 500 pounds to fly from, for example, Milan to Madrid). And I've learnt from experience that even with airfare and accomodation covered, I spend a few hundred bucks each trip in airport food, phone calls, hotel minibars, dinners and money changing.

But I love being in new places and meeting community people; there's something unique about a bunch of bits which engenders such global enthusiasm. They remind me of the TRS-80 User Group (Adelaide Micro User Group) when I was a kid, except less smoky.

Oh, and cleaned up the conntrack confirmation stuff. This solves at least one race I can see, and deletes alot of special case code. The disadvantage is that ipt_REJECT now generates the ICMP errors entirely by itself.

Thursday March 8 2001

I resigned from Linuxcare on Tuesday; I think my personal direction and the company direction are increasingly different. I believe the company has great internal strength and will continue to move forward.

The good news is, I'm off to Italy for four weeks. Less than one day a week online, I promise. And after that I'm scheduled to visit Linuxworld Madrid, Santiago in Spain and Sheffield in the UK.

Sunday February 25 2001

Last week I went to Christchurch, New Zealand to do some consulting, took some personal time with Alison. Had a great time, spoke to a small group at Christchurch about netfilter et al. Of course, came back to an overfull mailbox and more work than I know what to do with.

People are still mailing me about the Linux Graphing project; attempts to produce for-sale poster versions seem stalled (please don't EMail me, I really don't care unless you have some for sale).

The Sequent and IBM guys have produced a 2.4.1 patch to add read/copy/update locks as a first-class citizen to the Linux kernel. I find their approach over-engineered: such an effort might be justified if RCU locks were to sweep through the kernel like wildfire, but I prefer a 6k patch over a 60k patch for the moment.

My approach is to implement synchronize_kernel(), and create an enhanced schedule_task() which clones threads to allow them to sleep. This makes implementing a callback mechanism fairly easy, and builds on existing infrastructure.

Then I'll implement the new module infrastructure on top of this, and everyone should be happy.

Friday February 9 2001

OK, recovering from the all kernel graph mail. It didn't render on Red Hat (no tempfile, so 2.4.0a uses mktemp) and now doesn't render on Slackware (no mktemp). Slackware users can generally figure out the correct substitution though.

Had a report that 2.4.1 doesn't produce valid postscript. Possibly a problem continuing halfway through (have some known bugs there), or could be the parser breaking on some new code.

Friday week I'm in New Zealand; hope to talk at the LUG there (it's short notice, I know), and I'm going to fly Alli across for the weekend for us to unwind. After today, I feel like I'll need that.

Tuesday February 6 2001

Back to doing the Linux Kernel Graph, finally. I printed and hand-assembled a 6x6 prototype for the Linuxcare booth at LinuxWorld NY, but then got distracted away again. Ran it again from scratch tonight to check it's all OK; after some tweaks it's all working fine. Mentioned it to Dave Sifry, and he supplied a picture of Linus standing next to the NY one. Cool.

So, I prepared a page for it, and sent it out the announce to linux-kernel. Two major announcements in two days (ignoring the two weeks of work which went into this previously); not bad.

Monday February 5 2001

A little more tweaking by Anton, and voila . Of course, the actual implementation on x86 will take a little longer, but Anton is already working on UltraSparc support, so we can test it on an E10000...

synchronize_kernel() is slightly different implementation, which doesn't scale quite as well as the previous, but is less intrusive and simpler.

Sunday February 4 2001

After some brief discussions with people at linux.conf.au about quiescent points and an off-the-cuff comment to Anton about being able to use it to hotplug CPUs, some idiot at Microsoft apparently criticized Linux for not having hotplug CPUs.

I think this irritated Anton.

So I did the infrastructure, and Anton hacked together the quick-and-dirty low-level routines for the quad PPC box here, and he send me the following mail today before I got in:

From: Anton Blanchard <anton>
Date: Sun, 4 Feb 2001 13:43:49 +1100
To: Rusty Russell <rusty@linuxcare.com.au>
Subject: Re: [PATCH III] With /proc/sys/cpu/NNN stuff...
In-Reply-To: <E14P12N-0000ng-00@halfway>; from rusty@linuxcare.com.au on Sat, Feb 03, 2001 at 10:38:05PM +1100

Hey Rusty,

Check it out!

anton@drongo:~$ ./cpu_crashme 1 &

...

anton@drongo:~$ dmesg | grep Proc
Processor 3 spun down
Processor 3 spun up
Processor 2 spun down
Processor 0 spun down
Processor 0 spun up
Processor 3 spun down
Processor 2 spun up
Processor 1 spun down
Processor 1 spun up
Processor 2 spun down
Processor 3 spun up
Processor 3 spun down
Processor 2 spun up
Processor 1 spun down
Processor 1 spun up
Processor 1 spun down
Processor 3 spun up
Processor 3 spun down
Processor 2 spun down
Processor 1 spun up
Processor 0 spun down
Processor 2 spun up
Processor 1 spun down
Processor 0 spun up
Processor 2 spun down
Now you know you are an idiot
Processor 2 spun up
Processor 1 spun up
Processor 2 spun down
Processor 0 spun down
Processor 2 spun up
Processor 1 spun down
Processor 1 spun up

Saturday January 27 2001

Alan carries a nail punch with him. Alli and I needed one. This is why he's the Kernel God and I'm the random hacker, I guess.

Most of the netfilter fixes I want is in pre-10, the rest sent off to Linus and DaveM. Tellingly, much of the work here isn't mine, particularly Harald's IPv6 work.

Been working on the 2.4.0 version of the Linux Graphing Project ; should be ready for release late next week. It takes about 12 hours on my 400MHz Mobile Pentium II with 192MB of RAM, because I didn't aim for speed. A few people got a sneak preview at the conference; this week I printed out a 6x6 A4 sheets version (about 1.1m x 1.5m) after some minor mangling. This could be classed as a derived work, hence I figure the licence on the poster is GPL.

Thursday January 25 2001

Still discussing the quiescent state stuff Andi Kleen brought up, and I managed to float past a few people at the con. Keith Owens like the two-stage module delete (Alexey will be happy, it was his idea). With the quiescent state stuff it can work quite simply.

Andi and I disagree over implementation; I only skimmed the paper, and didn't read their code, so I think I have the advantage 8).

More FHS work; I discussed with Alan the /var/www proposal, and he argued that it shouldn't be normative. So I argued it shouldn't be in the standard. Then I read the proposal again, and it's basically completely non-normative anyway! The FHS doesn't need more "suggestions".

Tuesday January 23 2001

Dave M and Nina came down for the day. Dave bought me a `Rusty World Tour' T-shirt which Alison loves. I'll have to wear it next time I'm in California.

Friday January 19 2001

Gave my talk today. It was a particularly tough one, since the organizers had given me a pseudo-keynote ; normally if the talk is too technical or not technical enough, you can go to another talk. I had to please everyone. So the first third was really light, the rest was about random hacking projects. Was pretty happy with it; I did a fair amount of preparation, needed because much of the humor depended on timing statements with the overheads. I think most people enjoyed it; Alison has now finally seen me speak, too.

Since Harald Welte and James Morris were also at the con, we discussed netfilter-related stuff, of course. The web pages are going to be checked into CVS, so any team member can update them. I'll still run the scoreboard for the moment, but I'd like to convert that over as well, soon. We also discussed what's happening about getting stuff synced with Linus: bug fixes first, feature ups next, then finally all the stand-alone modules. Harald is working on sharing the TCP number information (duplicated in FTP, IRC and other future TCP helpers) in the core TCP code; he's also offered to enhance the TCP sequence number tracking patch to cover this core code. We want this in the next iptables release. Finally we want all the extensions to be made, even when not installed in that kernel, so distributions ship them all, and if people compile their own kernels (or new kernels include the new extension) it'll simply work.

Oh, and got given a gold-plated pewter Tux from linuxjewelry.com; all the speakers got them. They're pretty cool; the solid gold ones seem like way overkill though...

Thursday January 18 2001

First non-tutorial day of linux.conf.au . Some excellent talks; we found a Red Hat Noodle restaurant, and I managed to convince them to sell me a Red Hat Noodle T-shirt! Small things, small minds...

Monday January 5 2001

Martin Pool did an emacs lisp routine to speed up scoring. My hero!

Thursday January 11 2001

You know things are bad when you read linux-kernel to relax. Doing standards is tough. Still, I'm pretty happy over all with the FHS stuff.

Sunday January 7 2001

Wow, I've been writing (more often, not writing) an online diary for two years now. I'm sure it'll get interesting soon.

Looking back, it's over a year since I wrote my Lurker's Tale , which today I'd call Rusty's Unreliable Guide to the Linux Kernel Mailing List. And it's as relevent today...

Fixing configuration issues for netfilter in 2.4.1; choosing to be clever and do FTP helpers as a single option bit me in the Great Makefile Change. Surprise. Also doing FHS work: another revision tomorrow I hope.

Finally, I planned to release iptables 1.2 this weekend, but I hit a failure in the test suite which I'm going to have to track down first, so delay that a day. If it turns out to be a kernel problem, I'll have to submit that to Linus...

Hope everyone's coming to linux.conf.au , because the way that talk is shaping up it can never go online...


Rusty's 2000 Diary