Re: news for 2010-05

[olafBuddenhagen]

Hi,

On Tue, Jun 01, 2010 at 10:05:51AM +0200, Arne Babenhauserheide wrote:

> > This month Zheng Da
> > [reported](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-05/msg00037.html)
> > on the state of porting DDE linux26 to the Hurd, which can improve
> > the GNU Hurd Hardware support a lot: 
> 
> >> I tested pcnet32, ne2k-pci, rtl8139, e1000. pcnet32 works in both
> >> VMWare and qemu. Only qemu emulates ne2k-pci and rtl8139 cards and 
> both DDE
> >> drivers work well in qemu. ??? [[Zheng_Da|user/zhengda]]

Hm... Do you mean to include this verbatim? I think it's rather
confusing out of context...

The bottom line is that all drivers emulated by qemu and vmware work
fine now. However, AFAIK there have been no success reports so far from
running on real hardware. Justus tried 8139too, which didn't work
because of some missing functionality in DDE; and sis900, which kinda
worked after stubbing out one function, but crashes under load... I'm
not aware of anyone else having tried real hardware so far.

> > Also Sergio Lopez [added some
> > patches](http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-
> hurd/2010-05/msg00106.html) 
> > to prevent thread storms when synchronizing large pagers in ext2fs.
> > They 
> should improve performance for high throughput situations. 

This description might be a bit too abstract... Though I don't
understand enough of the details to describe it better :-(

BTW, I think you should also mention some of the other patches from
Sergio and others that went by this month. Most notably Emilio's patches
(which fix some bugs -- though I don't remember in what real-life
situtations these manifested); and Fredrik's settrans -i (or was that
already last month?), which greatly helps in debugging translators.

> > Additionally Justus Winter created a [live CD]
> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-05/msg00033.html) 
> > with an installation wizard in the spirit of the OpenBSD installer.
> > He needs testers to improve it. 

Glad you mention it -- this definitely should get more attention than it
has seen so far :-)

> > And the [scheduled IRC meetings for Google Summer of code]
> (http://lists.gnu.org/archive/html/bug-hurd/2010-05/msg00148.html) are
> continuing on Mondays and Thursdays, 10:30 UTC. If you want to catch
> up on them, you can have a look at the [channel logs]
> (http://richtlijn.be/~larstiq/hurd/). 

Does this really belong in a "month of the Hurd"?...

-antrik-