that’s whacked

catching up… is so hard to do

Friday, Jun 30. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

sorry for my absence… hopefully your heart has grown fonder…

i’ve been knee-deep in SCM-infrastructure-support for OpenSolaris lately… or as i like to call it: crud. this has been rather unglamorous work involving Tomcat, Apache, webapps, third party Java code, ant, and Python. i don’t mind Apache… and i even like Python. but there’s a reason i never learned Java.

call me a bigot. call me biased. whatever. i just don’t like Java. i know i know…the idea of an engineer working for Sun who doesn’t like Java cracks you up. i’m certain that in some warped reality of physics, the universe should cease to exist now…. i am the anti-matter to Sun’s matter.

i don’t really have a valid reason for it. i can’t back it up with any substantial claim or justification. i just don’t like it.

anyway. now that that’s out of my system…. i am hopeful that we will have Subversion hosting on opensolaris.org RSN. i shan’t quantify it any more than that, since god knows we’ve already hit delay after delay. but oh well. i’ve been told i’m a blindingly naive optimist.

i consider that a compliment

by the by, i will be presenting a high-level overview of OpenSoaris at next week’s SVLUG (Silicon Valley Linux User Group) meeting. i’ve been told this is the LUG that make Linus Torvalds swear never to go another LUG again.

is there truth to that? who knows.

if i can’t win them over with amazing technical demonstrations, or my equally amazing presentation prowess and charisma…. … .. ….well, i can try and win them over with swag.

my first kernel bug-fix putback

Friday, Jun 16. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

woot. one year after officially joining the kernel development group, i finally did my first non-CDDL/non-build-tree-related putback:

Event:            putback-to
Parent workspace: /ws/onnv-gate
                  (elpaso:/ws/onnv-gate)
Child workspace:  /net/zday/export/stevel/onnv.6330449
                  (zday:/export/stevel/onnv.6330449)
User:             stevel

Comment:
6330449 call to meminfo(2) with MEMINFO_PLGRP & invalid PA could in theory cause an assertion failure

Files:
update: usr/src/uts/i86pc/os/lgrpplat.c
update: usr/src/uts/sun4u/lw8/os/lw8_platmod.c
update: usr/src/uts/sun4u/serengeti/os/serengeti.c

Examined files: 3

Contents Summary:
       3   update

yeah yeah, it’s nothing fancy. but it’s mine.

and it’s my first.

one year down….

Wednesday, Jun 14. 2006  –  Category: OpenSolaris

It’s been one year since the OpenSolaris Launch… which is also when I joined the OpenSolaris engineering team (a.k.a.: tonic-iteam). I thought I would blog a bit on the progress of SCM which is something that has been fairly all-consuming for me recently.

I spent a fair bit of time in the past few months working on the Teamware->Mercurial conversion scripts, and creating a live bridge to facilitate the eventual conversion of ON from Teamware to Mercurial. Basically, the bridge runs everytime someone puts back to Teamware, and it converts the actions into Mercurial actions and does the analogous operations in Mercurial. For the most part this is pretty straight-forward, but there are some interesting operations that ha ve to be broken up to handle the open/closed repositories. Internally now, I’ve got an onnv_external repository which contains all the open (usr/src) code, as well as an onnv-gate repository which is a clone of onnv_external. onnv-gate also has a nested usr/closed directory which is its own repository which holds the usr/closed source code. I set it up this way to mirrour how I eventually think our repositories will live and be updated. onnv_external will live outside the SWAN and be accessible (at least for pulling from) to the Internet at large, whilst onnv-gate (and subsequently onnv-gate/usr/closed) will live within SWAN, and constantly pull from onnv_external in order to keep usr/src up to date.

So the bridge has been running for a while now, and starting this month – I’ve been using it to publish Mercurial changeset bundles which are self-contained collections of changesets that external users can unbundle into their Mercurial repository and do work on with the full history back to the launch one year ago. Starting with yesterday’s delivery, I’ve started tagging the build close dates, as well as publishing bundles of changesets for various builds that contain any respins/backouts so people can bring their repository exactly up to date with what Solaris Release Engineering spins as the final onnv build bits.

So what’s next in the SCM space? Well, internally we’re working on the SCM host applications for our SCM “beta test” that we hope to roll out in the next month. This is our first phase of the SCM for project hosting working we’re doing, and we’re basically going to offer Subversion support for projects. In the beta phase, this will be limited to the companion and JDS projects I believe. Further phases involve opening it up to general projects, as well as (I hope) Mercurial support.

So what’s next for me? In general, I’m still working on tree cleanup work – trying to make ON build cleaner and better with Mercurial. I’m also continuing work on the SCM app to build in more and better support/interaction with SCMs. So far I’ve worked on hooks, and infrastructure stuff for keeping various repositories up to sync and updated. This work will continue undoubtedly. I’m also starting to spend some time diving back into the NUMA and scheduling codebase I left behind a year ago to try and start working on some bugfixes in those areas.

two happy events

Monday, Jun 5. 2006  –  Category: Musings

it’s funny how minor little events can make your day. especially when you day has consisted of grappling with webapps. i hate webapps. seriously. can i say it again? i hate webapps.

anyway, the two minor little events that brightened my day:

1) i’ve walked under the trans-bay terminal overpass tons of times. mark today as the first day that i can ever recall, that the overpass has not smelled of urine. normally i hold my breath as i walk through it, but today, i inhaled wonderful clean smelling air the whole way through. bizarre.

2) i was accosted, on my way back to the office from grabbing a bite to eat, in the middle of a cross-walk by a young cute asian girl. she asked me if i had a sec, i said sure – thinking maybe she was lost and just needed directions – instead, she started preaching the virtues of God and how Jesus was my saviour and died for my sins, etc. etc. etc. believe it or not, this is the second time this has happened to me in SF. go figure. anyway, i was trying to shake her loose as i crossed the crosswalk by deferring politely noting that i wasn’t Christian, didn’t believe in God, and as far as i knew, i had never asked Jesus to die on the cross for me. i would have asked for significantly less…. (though, i am thinking now to ask him to smite this webapp for me). anyway, i was getting increasingly annoyed (mainly because i just wanted her to go away and let me eat my curly fries in peace), when all of a sudden, out of nowhere, a cyclist came barrelling around the corner and ran smack dab into her.

just like that. WHAM

i mean. wow. that was straight out of a movie. or a Bugs Bunny cartoon or something.

i helped the girl up, asked if she and the biker were okay – they said they were, and then i continued walking back to the Sun office in quiet curly-fry-munching bliss.

i took that as a sign from God that, while maybe he won’t help me with the webapp problems, he could at least rid me of the annoying evangelical girl who wouldn’t leave me alone.

ramblings

Thursday, Jun 1. 2006  –  Category: Computers, Football, Musings, OpenSolaris

i’ve been horribly delinquent in posting to my blog recently (aside from the brief cheer for a Bay Area MLS team a few days ago)

so, here goes one of my patented brain-dumps about what i’ve been up to recently. work stuff first. then personal.

i’ve become an intern sponsor for OpenSolaris, and started out sponsoring a few of Rich Lowe’s fixes. it’s been great to see the process working first-hand, but there’s nothing like being an actual sponsor and working hand in hand with someone in the community to make OpenSolaris better. the collaboration is great… IRC, IM, email, we have almost all the tools we need….

….one tool we don’t quite have yet is full SCM for ON. it’s coming, i swear it is. actually, a lot of my time spent recently has been on getting ON to build in Mercurial. this encompasses a few things: converting ON to Mercurial, and making sure ON builds cleanly without Teamware/SCCS around. these were actually some of the bugs that Rich and I have been working on. all my scripts/code to convert ON to Mercurial seem to be working well… well enough in fact that we started publishing Mercurial bundles on Tuesday. this was really gratifying, it’s a huge step forward to allowing community members to properly get diffs, build patches, etc.

the other OpenSolaris related thing i’ve been working on is getting the infrastructure ready for the SCM beta test phase. the companion CD, and JDS will be our first beta testers, and i’m sure it’s gonna be a rocky first few steps – but this is a big step forward to getting SVN/Hg hosting on opensolaris.org for our projects. this has been heinously complicated, mainly because there are so many groups involved. i’ll spare you all the details, but suffice it to say – that this has at times been tedious and frustrating – but it’s also been necessary, so oh well… some things you just have to put your head down and work on for the better good i guess.

as for all my copious spare time away from Sun, i’ve been working on the house – cleaning up the basement and painting in an attempt to remodel one of the rooms into a storage/work-area. we’re getting closer to having a non-repulsive basement now. wendy and i bought a 37″ LCD HDTV which has been nice. conveniently, in time for the HD coverage of the World Cup. the TV purchase, and the recent gift of an Opteron 185 chip from a friend gave me impetus to finally build the HDTV MythTV box i’ve been dreaming of for a while… so i went out and purchased all the components i need to build a super-uber-coolio HDTV MythTV box with 2 tuners. this will be my summer project, and one i’ll be blogging about periodically. i’m also hopefully going to install the SunRay server software on it and have an uber home server.

it’s been years since i’ve built my own machine (freshman year of college i think…), so i’m pretty excited to be geeking out on a project like this. it’ll be a lot of fun.

last weekend we headed to Denver for Wendy’s sister’s wedding. it was weird being in Denver with 90 degree weather. my body and brain is so conditioned to Denver being only a place to go snowboard… it was bizarre.

anyway. random ramblings are over. the webapp is done building (or complaining, at this point), so i need to get back to work. stop reading this junk, and go get some work done yourself.