Monthly Archives: October 2008

gentoo linux

Intel: iwl3945 improvements

October 31, 2008 – 8:02 am

Better but not great.

As I previously wrote about how much iwl3945 sucked. The .27 kernel seems like there has been many iwl improvements. When I say, “seems” – that is what I mean. I mean that it seems like there is improvements, and the changelogs show alot of iwl activity. So, my current experiences with iwl3945 still show some “troubles” with being on B networks. But this time, mixed networks work better and G networks work flawlessly. Even people with @intel.com email address are having issues with it, frankly, I am surprised that this bug has not been fixed yet. But hey, it did get a new assignee last week, maybe that is an improvement?

(Above observed results are with the 2.6.27.4 vanilla kernel)

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skydiving

Purty Canopy

October 29, 2008 – 10:34 am

Thanks to Paul, I now have a picture of me under my canopy…Cool!

Jeremy coming in to land

Jeremy coming in to land

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linux

Open Source Hardware?

October 24, 2008 – 9:55 am

Well, not really Linux related but I ran across a post today about Open Source Hardware. I guess it makes sense, and it pretty cool. Consider the Linksys WRT54G series, one of Linksys best sellers nowadays because some people discovered it was running embedded Linux. This isn’t quite the same as OSHardware, but close. Now consider having a profitable company that releases all specs to the microcontroller that they are mass producing, very neat idea. :) Read more here. (wired.com)

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life

Upsides of the "financial crisis"

October 22, 2008 – 5:54 pm

A short list:

  • Cheapest gas since 18 months ago, weee. I just paid $2.24 (A gallon of milk costs ~3.29)
  • The housing market will still be in a slump when I am looking to buy a place next summer. Yay, real estate will be on sale.
  • GREAT time to invest for a young, 22 year-old like me. I’m trying to pour money into the market now.
  • The stock market will come back, it always does.
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gentoo

Gentoo: New package, sys-apps/preload, a adaptive readahead daemon

October 17, 2008 – 9:29 pm

Hey all,
I just put preload into portage. I found this one by researching readahead stuff. Preload is an adaptive readahead daemon. This is a cool little app that I have been running all day now. The short story is that it scans /proc every 20 seconds and will maintain its own “database” of files to keep loaded in memory.

The long story is: The author’s whitepaper on preload. And more details can be found here.

Anyway, I could use testers on this package. I have observed noticable speedups on the first launch of apps like firefox, thunderbird, & vim. This does work and it is very smart. It cannot use “all your ram” and it has tons of configuration options. Please provide feedback, and file bugs as appropriate. Thanks.

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gentoo

Linux: in response to ’5 second boot’ (naive attempt at sReadahead)

October 16, 2008 – 3:51 pm

(In response to my own post, here)

I tried out sReadahead this morning. That experience was very disappointing initial testing. I will describe the process here:

  1. Download the source, from moblin.org and compile it.
  2. Install readahead-list, created by our own Robbat2
  3. Use the file lists from readahead-list and pass it to sreadahead’s generate_fileset command
    cd /etc ; generate_filelist /etc/readahead-list/runlevel-boot
    (I actually tried to concatenate both runlevel-boot and runlevel-default with no additional results.)
  4. Shove sreadahead in the readahead-list init scripts
  5. reboot

End result: No improvement in boot time with either readahead-list or sReadahead.
Disclaimer: This was a naive attempt and I’m sure I need additional kernel patches or something. But that is non obvious to me at this point. Anyway, if others want to expand on this…feel free to contact me.

Additional reading:
Improving boot time on a general Linux distribution, not an easy task (Mandriva dev)
LWN’s response to above post.

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linux

Linux: Linus has a blog! =)

October 16, 2008 – 2:35 pm

Old news…by about..2 weeks now. But in case some of you haven’t seen this yet, Linus Torvalds now has his own blog after “having avoided the whole blogging thing so far”

Anyway, here it is for all you blog maniacs out there.

http://torvalds-family.blogspot.com/

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gentoo

Linux: fastboot / my bootchart

October 14, 2008 – 11:47 am

Hmm, there is alot of buzz around the fastboot craze and now hitting the proverbial 5 second boot. This is turning out to be a fun thing to follow. Linus doesn’t like the fastboot patches but developers are adopting some of the patches that these guys have created (see lwn article, X devs offered to help, etc).

Anyway, many kudos to Intel for supporting the open source community, Powertop, latencytop, X, kernel..cool. Thank you Intel for your support. :) As such, I will support Intel with my purchasing power. Editted to add: (10/15/2008) As so kindly pointed out by leio on irc, “AMD does offer resources freely and contribute to OSS as well. For example, they are one big driving force and helper for the free firmware story – a story that GNU has at second position in free software important projects.” -leio. My opinion doesn’t really change here and this is getting to be out of scope for this particular post.

Without modifications to practically anything on my system. I have a working laptop in ~30 seconds. I plan on tweaking this some and hopefully I can shave it down to less than 20. 10-15 would be excellent, but not a big goal for me.

I find it rather interesting that there is no CPU or I/O activity until ~5 seconds. I’ll have to work on that I guess. Editted to add: (10/15/2008) See comments for hint on how to get bootchart to display the first 5 seconds. Thanks Donnie.

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