A changelog by Daniel Mettler

* a premiere: this early morning, i’ve made a linux kernel patch for the first time (not counting mixing/editing others’ kernel patches etc. ;) as ingo asked me to fix the minor devfs issues with his exec-shield patch myself. admittely it’s a very tiny one and i probably couldn’t have done it if ingo didn’t tell me it was a matter of changed field names only. nevertheless it was a very cool experience. dealing with the kernel is just magic :) the funky thing is that i’ve done this all on the box which has just served you this page – i bet nobody noticed anything of me compiling kernels in the background :) currently i’m running 2.4.22-ac1 with exec-shield-2.4.22-ac1-nptl-D4. i will merge in new patches as available.. need to get some more kernel books and stuff.

* i’ve just learned that toshiba is selling now an all-in-one wlan hotspot box built on gentoo. brave move. i wonder how they circumvent gentoo’s rare but still existing and sometimes very annoying quality assurance troubles (critical bugs, blockers and such). a year ago, i’ve been thinking about an all-in-one-barebone with pre-installed gentoo too, but for soho use only (file repository, application server, mail server, dbms, router, fw etc.). later i’ve bought my current lex barebone to do some prototyping. all in all i think gentoo would be suitable for such a thing, if there just weren’t these darn qa issues gentoo struggles with. regarding the hw, i probably wouldn’t use a lex barebone. as an advantage it has a small price tag, but the two fatal hard disk failures (two different brands) i’ve experienced so far (within about 9 months) make me conclude that the lex engineers probably didn’t test their product thoroughly (both hdd died of overheating). for me it’s not that much of a problem (living at the bleeding edge i’m almost used to failures), but for shipping it to customers it’s way too risky and costly.

my main workstation’s “soundblaster live! 5.1 digital” sound card seems to have stopped working a couple of days ago (don’t know why). the “funny” thing about it: whereas linux simply “disables” the sound device, windows (xp prof) “disables” the device but nevertheless freezes after about 5 minutes from boot-up (that’s a reproducible behaviour). there isn’t even a bsod, just “ice age” forever. my wild guess: could be an uncaught kernel counter overflow or sth similar. however, it might just as well be an unrelated problem of course (though i hope it is related in fact). hardware failures are keeping me pretty busy lately.. let’s see what happens if i remove/replace the sound card..

[update: after removing the sound card, windows stability probs disappeared. now i’ve taken a close look at the card and as i couldn’t find any evidence of a short-circuit (braised conducting paths are pretty easy to detect), i’ve reinstalled it. believe it or not: *drum-roll* the card is recognized again and all the woes have gone :) might just have been a loose connection..]

tried to apply ingo molnar’s exec shield patch to 2.4.22 vanilla sources but there were 3 (minor) rejects. i hope ingo is still maintaining his patch as i don’t want to miss it anymore (“put an end to your nightmares, get general buffer overflow protection for your server” ;).

reminds me that i actually should

* update some apps on this box
* eventually migrate all the old log entries and try to regain those i lost due to the hdd breakdown

the second task needs to wait, i guess ;)

meanwhile, .GNU has started teething. i wonder how much ms paid for system.windows.forms ;) most of you probably agree that regarding development costs, oss will always win those battles (note the pun, heh ;)

[update 20030828@02:30am: ingo has just sent me a recent version of his exec shield patch (exec-shield-2.4.21-cambridge-D2) which according to him should apply to most 2.4.22 kernels. of course i’ve instantly tried it with a 2.4.22 vanilla kernel – unfortunately there are 11 rejects. hearing he will do a 2.4.22 port soon is excellent news however.. many thanks to ingo for his efforts and this kind and obliging response!]