Older blog entries for mike750 (starting at number 20)

Tested out the new copy on small packets code in the olympic_rx() function. Looks good.
Someone somewhere is having problems with olympic, every 2-3 hours the interface stops and an ifconfig down/up is needed to recover it. This is definately not the drivers fault, although we are going to have to deal with it. I'm suspecting pci bus errors at the moment, there maybe a revision of the adapter that is really susceptible to this. Time for some extended testing.

I have got *so* many things in the queue for the drivers now, I really need a week off work just to get it all sorted out. Things should be easier once the British Invasion go back home.

Fixed up the compile problems with 2.0.3x. Still needs the mkdep from 2.4.4, although installing the debian version of the 2.0.38 kernel source and gcc 2.7.2 got everything working.

Started banging away with glade. I'm writing a user app to interface with the t/r adapters. Annoyingly the autogen.sh scripts that glade creates links in libdb.so (for no good reason) so had to install libdb3-dev as well as libgnome-dev, very interesting over a 14.4 connection.

The Stanford checker has found one issue with ibmtr in 2.4.4, I'll have to take a look and see what's going on. It's in tr_rx where some very strange magic goes on.

The British Invasion #1 landed on Thursday so didn't get a lot of work done over the weekend :(

PCMCIA-CS breaks on 2.4.x because I've removed the drivers/net/tokenring/ibmtr.h file. He, he, I'm not putting it back, pcmcia-cs will have to be fixed. So giving in I'm going to test pcmcia-cs against all three levels of kernel (2.0,2.2 & 2.4) and see what needs changing to get it to work with all of them. Of course, 2.0.39 decides not to compile up on my machine. First off mkdep was SIGBUS'ing. Grabbing mkdep from 2.4 fixed that, but now all the includes are wrong. Debian doesn't symlink /usr/include to the kernel source (quite right too) but the 2.0.39 build scripts think they do, so I'll have to fix all that up first. *sigh*

Loaded up a copy of Elite:FFE to play and found that modern machines are just too quick and I'm getting blown away in seconds before I have a chance to zero in a missile the baddies. Perhaps if I play it under vmware it will slow it down enough :)

Gave up with NS 6 on the iMac, the extra memory speeds it up but it still sucks. So it's now got Mozilla 0.9 instead which is working fine as long as you don't try to quit with no windows open.

Hmmm, life was going well until I got a report that setting LAA doesn't work in 2.4. Took a quick look and the report is quite right. Hacked net-tools apart and found the problem. There are two fixes for this, one simple and one "right". So I've done the simple one for now, the "right" one will take a little longer.

Memory has turned up for the iMac, I hope this improves the performance of NS 6, otherwise I'm going to put Mozilla 0.9 on the machine.

*Sigh*, looks like my flight is going to be late tonight, again :(

More fun and games. I've got the docs for pnp support for the ibm adapters now, so I can start to put proper pnp support into the driver.

php continues to amaze me, you can whack up a good web site in no time once you've got all the basics sorted. Combined with postgress this is making my life so much easier.

Spent some more time thinking about coding up lanaid for linux. I'm considering using a Gtk and command line interface with a kernel module to get access to the adapters. Haven't decided whether to use ioctrl's or /proc yet.

Watched the first Bubblegum Crisis 2040 dvd last night. Looks like it will be a good series (nothing like hot girlies in tight suits...). I'm up to #5 in the Neon Genesis series and its turning it to be very good. I originally thought it might just degrade into a good guys vs bad guys mess, but the storyline has got some nice twists in it.

Did loads of house stuff yesterday in preparation for the English invasion. Put the Union Jack up outside the house and now it's raining. I hope the flag hasn't brought the English weather with it :-)

Started building the new linuxtr web site, despite the fact that the site is totally static it now looks outdated. So I'm re-doing it with some nice tables within tables and other good stuff.

Got up this morning at 4.30am to catch the plane up to Chicago for the week. Worked on the web site some more on the plane.

Grrr, Connectiv cancelled their installation. They were going to replace the electricity pole for our house and remove some obsolete wires. So I downed the server and the workstations for no reason at all. Not happy.

Woke up far too early, i.e. 4am. Couldn't get back to sleep so got up and beat php and postgress into submission.
Hint - When upgrading from postgres 7.0 to 7.1, pg_dump _all_ your databases and just re-do the installation from new, upgrading between the two versions doesn't work properly with Debian, far, far easier just to reload everything.
So the new library database at home is up and running using Apace+php+postgres :)

Then discovered that Netscape 4.7 doesn't pass spaces properly in a url so upgraded the iMac to 6.0.

Shit, how much memory does NS 6 want !!! Time to buy some more memory, me thinks.

Spent today playing with php, rewriting my web based library catalogue system for the home library.

PHP is the dog's danglies, it is just so much easier than other cgi programming.

Made the receive buffer changes in olympic and some of the simple fix-ups suggested by Jeff Garzik.

Other than that its been a quiet day - I've actually had to do some of the work I get paid for - eeek !!!

Merged in the ppc changes to ibmtr.c Nothing too drastic, just sorting out the byte ordering on 16 bit reads. Tested out fine on ix86 so we don't appear to have broken anything.

Just wait for some feedback from the ppc testers and we'll release it to the world.

Back to olympic now and the receive buffer copying issue.

It's actually managed to get above 80 degrees in Chicago. Everybody up here is complaining like mad, not me, this is my type of weather. Living in MD for 3.5 years kinda conditions you to the heat and humidity.