Kernel

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

Today Tom Rhodes (trhodes@) has committed a massive patch against FreeBSD-HEAD, allowing Intel C/C++ Compiler to build kernel. This change should not change the current gcc based build infrasture.

He is again committing numerous CAPS IPC work. Well, again, is it really 锁骨?

At the same time, Hiten Pandya has done website work. This also inspired me to improve the bachelor’s research site and Candice has reported that the problem has gone.

Don Lewis (truckman@) has committed a fix for the sysctl spinning problem I mentioned here some days before. Currently, beastie.frontfree.net is running a workaround which made it possible to skip the deadlock, however, will not guarantee the correct result.

From Microsoft’s KB:

You can configure Microsoft Windows 2000, Microsoft Windows XP, and Microsoft Windows Server 2003 to write debugging information to three different file formats (also known as memory dump files) when your computer stops unexpectedly as a result of a Stop error (also known as a “blue screen”, system crash, or bug check). You can also configure Windows not to write debugging information to a memory dump file. Windows can generate any one of the following three memory dump file types:

1. Complete memory dump
2. Kernel memory dump
3. Small memory dump (64 KB)

Several servers I manage running FreeBSD 5-CURRENT as of 20040228 appears to bearing wierd deadlocks, which could be triggered by ps(1), top(1) and w(1).

junsu and I have discussed about some big hacks to FreeBSD kernel, and the implementation of a minidump is a good idea, I think.

On Windows there’s a minidump mechanism. The minidump will save ‘crashing’ pages only, while full dump will save the whole core memory when the system going to crash.

I finally understood what he want, according to his post today:

" Hey, here’s an idea… using the VFS wrapper idea our
‘ports’ system could create a namespace that makes everything
appear to be preinstalled. So instead of CDing somewhere and
typing make, or running an apt-get type of utility, you would
simply run the program you want to run and our package manager
would download and install it on the fly."

Despite being hurt in an accident, he finally committed the newtoken commit to DragonFlyBSD!!

This will catch up with FreeBSD-CURRENT’s latest kern_fork.c change (rev. 1.215):

https://research.delphij.net/freebsd/pid.diff

The patch is based on junsu’s port of NetBSD PID Allocator. Use this on your own risk :-)