David O'Brien

So time comes that we should consider whether some of our string operations is not optimial and needs some operation. NetBSD seems to have done a lot of good work to make their MD layer better, and we should take these improvements if they are proven.

David O’Brien has pointed out that we should be careful on this, however, since some micro optimizations may hinder performance in a large scenario. With this concern in mind, I will redo some more benchmarks and request for -arch@’s idea before considering commiting the patchset. Currently, the NetBSD implementation of swab(2) is proven to be slower than the GCC generated code by about 25%. I will look into the assembly code generated to see whether I can help to solve this.

As Murray is moving, David E. O’Brien would be my mentor for the next week. My pending commit queue is on my freefall home directory. Among this, I have patch-handbook_update and patch-cron the first priority. The latter needs more review, though.

David O’Brien has gave me the FreeBSD 1.x CVS Repository and I have set up a CVSWeb view for it so it will be easy to read the code/changes.

FreeBSD 1.x was forbidden and supposed to be destroyed in May 1994, because the lawsuit of USL against BSDI, UC Berkeley, and the FreeBSD/NetBSD projects. Today, as 32V and some code in the same time was released under BSD License, it is legal to keep the repo again.

FreeBSD 1.x is based on 4.3 BSD, while FreeBSD 2.x and later are based on 4.4BSD-Lite2. The historical archive, is valuable for anyone who interested in the Operating System itself, its development, and more.

Today obrien@ has committed a somewhat determintic code to distinguish FreeBSD RELENG_5 from 5.2-CURRENT to 5.3-BETA:

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obrien      2004-08-23 03:28:01 UTC

  FreeBSD src repository

  Modified files:        (Branch: RELENG_5)
    sys/sys              param.h 
    contrib/gcc/config   freebsd-spec.h 
  Log:
  Enter the great FreeBSD 5.3!
  
  Approved by:    re(kensmith)
  
  Revision   Changes    Path
  1.17.2.1   +2 -2      src/contrib/gcc/config/freebsd-spec.h
  1.209.2.1  +1 -1      src/sys/sys/param.h

David O’Brien has just imported binutils 2.15 snapshot into FreeBSD src repository. What’s more, he stated that he will do gdb 6.x import soon. This will drastically improve the debug and development environment in FreeBSD.

Finally the long-awaited gcc 3.4.0 RELEASE has been released. When will it be ported to FreeBSD’s main tree?

Today I met a famous FreeBSD developer, David O’Brien (a.k.a. obrien@) and he gave us a presentation about the AMD64 architecture, which cleared my misunderstanding about the AMD64 architecture set by some marketing guys presenting in Tsinghua University.

用中文写了，因为这次活动只涉及北京地区的FreeBSD’er。昨天跟liue, hd商量基本确定下周六下午在网络中心的会议室(地点待定)举行一次小型的活动(主要是因为场地限制)，内容暂定为ports维护(如何写和维护port)、内核优化等等。

David O’Brien has announced the -O2 clean for AMD64 platform. Meanwhile, it seems that alpha has a -O2 clean build now!