Mon, 08 Jan 2007

lhype: speculation on a new name, and networking work

So, Ingo Molnar hates the name "lhype"... mainly the "hype" part, believing that noone will take it seriously. I guess I'm not that serious a person, so this didn't trouble me at all. However, Ingo is brilliant so I'm considering changing the name. "LL" (Linux on Linux) is the current front-runner.

Meanwhile, virtbench is supposed to be guiding my hand at more optimizations, except first it's serving to stress-test lhype. The networking code is the latest victim: I didn't realize that a driver could call netif_stop_queue on itself and return NETDEV_TX_BUSY, and the packet gets nicely requeued and everything. I had open-coded a single-packet-cache because... well, I guess my expectations are low. The Linux networking code is so nice to work with!

Now it works, virtbench shows that it's slow. My current 8 packet receive queue for a mega-high speed device like a virtual NIC is criminal. Supporting huge numbers of registered buffers without consuming wads of host memory requires another rework, but now I can justify it!

The reason this weekend has been so productive is that I finally finished Zelda: Twilight Princess on the Wii. Gamespot reckoned it offered 30-40 hours of gameplay: it took this newbie over 85 hours! And that's despite losing my "googling for puzzle solutions is cheating" inhibitions around the 60 hour mark...


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