Stealing From Smart People
Delightedly finished reading through the linux.conf.au program. Some nasty clashes have me still arguing with myself, but here are my personal compulsory attendance talks. Your preferences will no-doubt differ, so I’ve tried to explain my reasons: Tridgell: Open Hardware Differential GPS – I spoke to Tridge about this, and the abstract completely undersells it. …
Continue reading “linux.conf.au 2014: Rusty’s Must See List”
I don’t know who wrote this originally, but this is from my .bashrc. Tridge’s is simpler, but has colour! Before this, I avoided git branches in favour of multiple copies of repositories because I use my prompt to provide location. This provided the missing piece… # Git me harder! __git_ps1 () {    local g=”$(git …
As raised recently by Sarah Sharp, the Linux Kernel mailing list (lkml) has a reputation as an intimidating place. The context (covered so well by LWN) was that Greg Kroah-Hartman, the stable maintainer, is seen as a soft touch who accepts patches Linus wouldn’t. There’s been much uninformed discussion from those outside lkml, so let’s …
I’ve been collecting these as I research the bitcoin protocol, so I thought it was worth posting about. None of these are groundbreaking, but these are what surprised me as I deepened my understanding. 10 Minute Blocks. Currently 9 minutes. But usually 7 minutes. Everyone talks about a block every 10 minutes, but that’s the …
Continue reading “6 Technical Things I Learned About Bitcoin”
http://www.oasis-open.org/committees/virtio Over the last few years, interest in virtio has begun compounding. FreeBSD have their bhyve implementation, there’s an MMIO bus and SCSI endpoint implementation, and I’ve been fielding more queries about various alternate implementations. While it’s taken longer than I’d hoped, the effort hasn’t waned as I feared. So I have carved out some …
Continue reading “VIRTIO Growing Up: OASIS Standard Technical Committee”
Last week I used 2 BTC to support Jupiter Broadcasting’s Unfilter show (and their other shows, but only Unfilter takes BTC so far). Just now I noticed that someone made a 0.5BTC donation to my blog (I’ve had a BTC donation address in the sidebar of my blog for a few years now). Thanks! As …
With the imminent release of gcc 4.8, GCC has finally switched to C++ as the implementation language. As usual, LWN has excellent coverage. Those with long memories will remember Linux trying to use g++ back in 1992 and retreating in horror at the larger, slower code. The main benefit was stricter typechecking, particularly for enums (a …
This year’s organizers took specific pains to attract deep content, and the schedule reflects that: there are very few slots where I’m not torn between two topics. This will be great fun! After a little introspection, I did not submit a talk this year. My work in 2012 was with Linaro helping with KVM on …
There were some great comments on my previous post, both in comments here and on the Google Plus post which points to it. I’d like to address the point here, now I’ve had a few moments to do follow-up work. One anonymous commenter, as well as Stephen Hemminger via email, point to the existing lockless …
Continue reading “Fixed-length semi-lockless queues revisited”
One of my vacation project was to look at a good queue implementation for ccan/antithread. I read a few papers, which mainly deal with generic link-list-style queues (I got quite excited about one before I realized that it needed a 128-bit compare-and-swap for 64 bit machines). I only really need a fixed-length queue of void …