Various bits and pieces

Last night was a super conference call day knockout bonanza! Amongst other things, I had a chat with the kind folks at Cray about their XD1 and Linux involvement over the last few years. I pointed out that I used my first Cray around 10 years ago and that of the Virtex II Pro technology they use, I did one of the three Linux ports myself. So, we had some good pretext for a lively conversation – then I learned that the guys I was talking to were mostly in Canada at the time (I thought so, from the accents) and just geeked out a little bit more. Looks like I’ll be up visiting a UK installation over the next couple of weeks – I’d be keen to get involved with that a bit more (I’ve probably still got some massively parallel array sorts I wrote kicking around here someplace). After that call, the next call with the publisher went quite well too and I decided to try sleeping early and getting online again early today.

Planning for $thing at the moment. Certainly should be quite interesting (looking forward to being able to say more about it) but will require a bit more time this week. Currently, I’m using my uptime to get synced up with some deadlines as I’m out and about on Thurs/Fri of this week doing the lunch thang. Andrew Morton is being typically demanding by asking that my floppy fix from a couple of weeks back actually work under all circumstances :-) It’s not easy with the current driver because it likes to poll the floppy drive async with respect to operations which need to know if they can currently write to the inserted disk. All this means is that I’m going to have to re-jig bits of the rest of it so that it works how I wanted. On the subject of amusing kernel patches (was I on that subject anyway?), Greg KH posted a super-piss-off-the-anti-GPL-people patch yesterday with his not so subtle s/EXPORT_SYMBOL/EXPORT_SYMBOL_GPL/ replacement in the PCI core driver code. That’ll make it impossible to write non-GPL PCI drivers if it gets accepted (cool!).

Back to work now.

Jon.

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