September 2009 Archives

So, writing up my PhD thesis took a little longer than expected, as did organising the viva.  But last week I passed said viva, and tomorrow I'll be getting on a plane to Hamburg with no immediate plans to return other than for visits.

It feels less scary, right now, than it sounds.

(This is my excuse for the reduced number of exciting Mesa commits and blog posts recently, of course.  I need to grow some more brain cells after using my current stock up last week...)

Having realised that most of the bugs I was chasing aren't actually my fault (see the to-do list), I've been allowing myself to work on the Mesa driver for Glamo.  A rebase (sorry!) against the latest Git master branch of upstream Mesa was required to get some important DRI2 fixes, but now it works.  I'm not going to go into much detail (I need to sleep), but enough of the initialisation and buffering stuff works that things can be drawn (using Glamo's 2D engine at the moment) and then put on the screen (front buffer) successfully.  It's enough to draw a blue rectangle at the moment.  Not much, but you wouldn't believe how much Stuff has to be working correctly for that to happen.

Actually, I expect that readers of the journal would believe exactly how much Stuff is involved...

I've done a backport of the BFS scheduler to the 2.6.29 kernel currently used by Openmoko.  This is only for people who want to try something new and exciting before the official release of the forthcoming 2.6.31 kernel for Openmoko with our new repository layout (at which point the upstream BFS patch should apply cleanly).

It's hardly tested, and I might have screwed up the patch completely (I don't really know my way around these areas of the kernel), but here it is: BFS for Openmoko.

My experience was, despite reports of dramatic speedups on Android, that there wasn't a huge amount of difference compared to the conventional scheduler.  Your experiences may differ, however.