Poekie

Just a few minutes ago my dad told me that my cat Poekie had been killed by a car. Here's a picture of Poekie.

some more pictures of Poekie

We had saved him twice before, but aparantly I couldn't save him this time :-(

We found him as a kitten and fed him and gave him a home. For years, everything went fine, until last summer when he got bitten by a rat. He almost died from the infection... We didn't notice that he had a wound, because his fur is so thick and he didn't complain much about it. Just the lack of appetite disturbed me.

Now, apparantly last night he crossed the street and got hit by a car.

Internet phone

Today a colleague of mine pointed me to a Internet phone application called Skype. It gave it a try and it sounded remarkably pure and clear. They apparantly had just released their GNU/Linux version today.

Bochs

Not all bugs are equal. Some are easily located by just looking at the code, some by watching the execution flow. Some bugs are really hard to locate and a debugger can help in tracing those.

When you're working on a project which involves modifying Linux kernel code, you'll have to be able to debug the Linux kernel. This is harder then debugging normal userspace applications. But luckily, the Linux community has provided some decent tools such as the various kernel debuggers and f.e. DProbes.

When you're programming RTAI, and you're bitten by an RTAI kernel bug, you're in big trouble. The Linux kernel debugging tools in general don't just work together with RTAI's ADEOS patch. So, there's no real tool to aid you. The best thing that might happen if something goes wrong is a kernel Oops, which you can try to trace and fix (See this Oops tracing howto).

Unfortunately, some bugs are really mean. They might cause a crash without an Oops or they might for example give you no backtrace at all.

One possibility for debugging such ugly beasts is a PC emulator such as Bochs. The Bochs PC-emulator has an integrated debugger. Unfortunately, Bochs is really slow. Some say, the emulation system runs about two hundred times slower then your real system.

Nevertheless, I tried to use it to debug RTAI/LXRT applications, but unfortunately, RTAI/LXRT applications don't run stable yet using Bochs.

CORBA porting adventures

Because of issues with the TAO 1.3 OCI release, I started the port to 1.4.1 knowing that we would need that port anyway because of CIAO. The initial direct try from 1.3-OCI to 1.4.1-DOC was a failure,
too much had changed (9 versions) and apparantly I made a mistake somewhere...

The next try took a lot more work, because I ported to every successive version from 1.3-OCI to 1.4.1-DOC. So, from OCI's 1.3 release to the DOC group at Washinton University 1.3, to 1.3.1 DOC, and with every version in between to the final 1.3.x release of the DOC group 1.3.6-DOC. Then the porting continued to the major new DOC group release 1.4.0 and finally to 1.4.1-DOC.

Now, to be able to merge, I'll have to port it to the 1.4.2 CVSUP tree version. And ofcourse, test it extensively.

How to trace a kernel Oops

Since a lot of the questions I answer keep returning to me, I thought I would be useful to set up a FAQ webpage. The first real entry explains how to trace a Linux kernel Oops.