Thursday
Up at around 9:30 again. While having breakfast, a mistaken bite reminded me that wisdom teeth are around to give me a hard time. Fortunately it was nothing serious, not worth an emmergency visit to the dentist, anyway. I'll have to make an appointment sometime soon though, been a while since last time.
No classes in the morning so stayed in, checking email, news, websites, generally trying to stay on top of things. Gave yet another try to the test machine but eventually decided the disk is really terminally ill. Good news is that one of the in house mates has a small spare disk to lend so by monday, if all goes to plan, I can start testing kernels as planned. This is especially important considering the feature freeze is rapidly approaching, October 20 according to Linus himself, so the focus is then on bug chasing.
From what I could see, and mind you that my kernel knowledge is _nothing_ compared to the gurus that actually come up with new ideas and code them in, I think the kernel has seen some major improvements and got added some neat features. A few days ago there was quite a lot of discussion as to whether the next stable release should be called either 2.6 or 3.0. But I'm not even going there. In the end it's just a number. Of course there's always the marketing implications (3.0 is indeed much more appealing than 2.6) but it's useless to discuss. Linus seems to be more inclined to go for 3.0 and I don't argue. Nor should I :) In fact many things got at least partially done, like the rewrites of the block and IDE layers, lots of VM bits including most of -rmap, new O(1) scheduler and other important things from Ingo Molnar, preempt by Robert Love, you name it. Maybe the sum of the parts actually give way to a 3.0 release. We'll just see :)
On another note, decided to stop by the university's library to check if there are some books I'm willing to read. Came across Silberschatz's Operating Systems Concepts and it's indeed very nice reading. Planning to keep reading it. Together with Understanding the Linux Kernel (which could do with a reviewed and improved version) and Linux Device Drivers, 2nd Edition, I think it can be a good study base for me to learn more about this field of computer science. Afterwards, the first class of Computer Architecture after yesterday's introduction. Basically the professor gaves us the layout of the semester's subjects. Here's a short overview for anyone enough curious:
- Performance Analysis - Architecture's Instruction Set (for MIPS) - Building an Arithmetical Logical Unit - Building a complete processor for MIPS arch. - Performance improvement using pipelining - Memory systems: caches and virtual memory - I/0, network and other bits
I confess I'm especially attracted by the memory systems. Really looking forward to this.
Got home at around 18:00. Switched to non-productive mode. Oh wait, it was already turned on.