Advogato blog for rth

2 May 2000

Tue, 2 May 2000 09:52:08 GMT

Finished merging the condexec bits to mainline. Whoo hoo.

Decided that my headache wasn't quite pounding at the proper weekend-bender level, so I dived face-first into the gcc build configury. There is much progress. Why, already I have replaced 380 lines of completely unreadable make+sh with 280 different lines of even less readable make+sh.

Tomorrow I'll try to bulk that back out to 500 or so with brand new shared library build cruft. Wouldn't want anyone to think I was going soft.

28 Apr 2000

Fri, 28 Apr 2000 06:29:40 GMT

So I've been lame. I wondered how long this would take. About a week it seems.

Lots o' condexec hacking over the past week. Merged 200k of patches in 14 parts last night. Halfway done, though the really hard part is over. Bushed.

Got nice-n-toasty at the bar until the dj came in and started being excessively loud. Tool.

19 Apr 2000

Wed, 19 Apr 2000 06:50:08 GMT

Lots of condexec hacking today. Talked to wilson and runrau about using branch prediction info during if-conversion. Realized how suboptimial this first cut is likely to be. Need to spend some time looking through papers soon (trimaran and uiuc come to mind).

Hopefully I'll get the first cut on the non-trivial transformations finished enough to be functional tomorrow. If so, I'll have the pleasure of deleting 2100 lines of butt-ugly jump.c code.

18 Apr 2000

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 08:19:24 GMT

DaveM is no L33T HaX0r, he's a prentice butt munch Kwake L00s3R. If he wuz 4 reel master, he'd be plaing uNreel Tournamint.

18 Apr 2000

Tue, 18 Apr 2000 04:42:58 GMT

Implemented __builtin_expect for current cvs. This was a Cygnus local feature done ages ago, but in a moderately kludgy way. At the same time, I got to seriously look at the block reordering code that Stan did earlier this year. It's looking pretty good. Even without profile feedback or explicit annotations, estimate_probabilities seems to come up with reasonable guesses a lot of the time. It'll be good when Jason finishes fixing the debug info interactions so we can turn this on for real.

Franz ran into yet another problem with the new flow code. Seems the PPC backend is being naughty with eliminible registers. Geoff was non-committal about fixing it, at least right away. I suppose we can hack around the problem for now.

Nasty structure passing bug uncovered in the sibcall code. No fucking clue how to fix it properly. But if we did solve it properly, we'd have automatically fixed the REG_EQUAL backing store uncleanliness at the same time. Should discuss alternatives with Law tomorrow.

16 Apr 2000

Sun, 16 Apr 2000 09:12:21 GMT

Overdosed on adrenaline by playing twitchy video games with Jamie and the SubG all afternoon. The new maps in Rouge Spear: Urban Operations are pretty cool.

14 Apr 2000

Fri, 14 Apr 2000 03:47:36 GMT

It was too pretty outside to get very excited about hacking, and as a consequence very little got accomplished.

Fixed (hopefully) rearnshaw's ARM problems; fixed kenner's stupid extract_muldiv bug; looked at franz' PPC bootstrap problem long enough to see that it is ugly.

Ok, that's three in a row. I hate solicitors. I hate being called by them. I don't get as much joy as I ought by telling them to fuck off and die. They should all be rounded up and shot. I need procmail for my phone.

And now I plan on unplugging the phone and curling up with sugar and a trashy novel.

12 Apr 2000

Wed, 12 Apr 2000 08:34:16 GMT

Reverted the functional changes from this weekend's flow merging. I've got to get a better handle on the illogic at work here.

Got a couple hours worth of code review in this evening, so at least I can lay claim to some forward progress today.

11 Apr 2000

Tue, 11 Apr 2000 09:14:05 GMT

Binutils work all day. Blah. Who'd have believed folks would be building 96MB shared libraries?

Anyway, patch delivered.

10 Apr 2000

Mon, 10 Apr 2000 06:31:42 GMT

Spent more time than I'd like to think about on the ppc cross-host thing this morning, but eventually reproduced the problem from an x86 cross. Nothing but irritation from start to finish. No fix yet, though it appears to be a latent bug in combine.

Earnshaw reported a different bug from Friday's flow changes that affect ARM; some mem sharing ugliness exposed by more aggressive postinc opts. Odd, there shouldn't have been more postinc opts.

Beer was most definitely called for. I could have done without the Sharks losing; that sorta put a wet towel on the atmosphere at the bar.

It hasn't been my weekend.