RMS being the first to talk about the “Open Source” idea

Nah, I never commented on anybody’s blog, but this was over the top, Richard, you should really try to experience some online translation service, if you want to get your blood pressure over what is needed to lose some weight, and as I’m trying do so, go, quick, read Avi Alkalay’s blog!

5th dwarf fighting for attention

After all it will be eclipsed by the 6th, and then by the long cherished 7th, the one that will trigger the 1.0 pahole (btw, the 1st dwarf!) release. So, without too much ado, ctracer, the aforementioned current dwarf, is making great inroads into being something useful to more than one person, perhaps, but anyway, I’m getting short on time, my wife is almost ready for us to enjoy the current weather here in Curitiba, after our beloved cocker spaniel got his nail cut way too short, bleeding :-(, well, continue reading from here…

The 5th dwarf

Have to cook the turkey, so this one will be brief, have been working on a new tool, that ultimately will provide what ostra was capable of, ctracer, the new tool generates a kernel module that after built and loaded provides these preliminary results. Now to work on a not so lame relaying module for the trace information, such as the one in blktrace.

C++ dwarves

Have been working on supporting C++ concepts expressed in DWARF tags, so far we support definitions of classes, enums, etc inside classes, namespacing not yet supported, but as each class, being inside another class or not have a unique DWARF identifier, the so called cu (Compilation Unit) offset, not having namespaces is not much of a problem, only when printing a class we don’t see it properly nested, but this will be handled shortly.

Another thing to do is to add support to DW_TAG_inheritance, so that the dwarves gang don’t get confused with the “first” member having a non-zero offset, this also is something that sounds rather easy to implement.

All in all this experience has been so far very interesting, to finally match all the theory I have learned in another life, some 13 years ago, when I was a C++ programmer, matching the reality of a, by now, mainstream compiler, g++ 🙂

Anybody that by chance reads these ramblings and uses another compiler that generates DWARF info (Intel C, for instance comes to mind) and that could send me an object file + the preprocessed output for me to see if these tools works correctly with something non-gcc/g++ would be very welcome and I’d really appreciate a lot.

Pahole fighting non network bloat

Andrew Morton merged the two patches I’ve submitted for saving bytes in struct inode and struct mm_struct, great! I’ve also did some more work on pahole based on ideas by Bernhard Fischer, that also provided a patch fixing the –help command line option.

On the DCCP front we’re going thru some growing pains, with CCID3 getting bugs fixed but in the process seemingly having its performance dropped, in the next few days we’ll surely get it to a better state, but its nice to have more people involved and actively working on fixing bugs, implementing missing functionality and discussing the patches that are continuously being submitted, thanks guys!