Long time no write.... My last diary entry was almost one year ago!

Playing with LILO and Slashdot

This morning, I loaded the Slashdot home page and... Oops! What's there in the story at the top of the page? Three links to my LILO pages. Ouch! This is going to hurt... Welcome to the Slashdot effect! Quick look at the logs of the web server: since this morning, the server has already seen more than 20,000 visitors making more than 300,000 requests. And many people in the US are still in bed at this time. All these downloads are going to suck a significant amount of bandwidth...

Playing with LILO is fun. It is also interesting because it encourages good programming practices. Testing a modified boot screen requires a reboot of the PC, and any fatal error in the program is likely to prevent the computer from booting at all. So I take the time to re-read my code before rebooting. This reminds me of the good old time when I was programming in Z80 assembler on my ZX Spectrum.

Playing with the Linux kernel

Yesterday, I had to run some tests at work with a modified version of the Linux TCP stack. The goal was to change the initial size of the congestion window and to run some performance tests on a dedicated network (with high bandwidth*delay product). Of course, there is no /proc interface for changing that, because this would violate the standards. So I decided to add my own. I had never looked closely at the Linux kernel code before, and I never touched the TCP stack.

It took me a while to find the file that I had to change, but find, grep and emacs are very useful tools. Once I found the file (net/ipv4/tcp_input.c), it was really easy to change the way the cwnd was initialized. Half an hour later, I had created two new interfaces in /proc/sys/net/ipv4 and everything was working. I even added a new option in net/ipv4/Config.in to make these features optional. By reading or writing to the pseudo-files in /proc, I could dynamically alter the behavior of the TCP stack and make it standards-compliant or not.

This was a very interesting experience for me, because I have been working on free software for a long time, but still I did not expect that it would be so easy to add a new feature to something as complex as the TCP stack of Linux. Of course, I only had to do a very small change that was limited to a few files, but it was interesting for me to see how easy it was to understand how the /proc interfaces work and how the kernel configuration works, considering that it was the very first time that I looked at it. So I have to congratulate the kernel hackers for all this nice work.