Archive for June, 2003

I never stopped working this last weekend. I worked Saturday and Sunday. Then I worked 20 hours yesterday. Damn I was tired today. But, I managed to get two patches out and working. The first patch was a rehash of a patch I wrote against the 2.4.9 linux kernel for Red Hat Advanced Server 2.1. It’s the io_request_lock patch. Basically, the linux block subsystem uses one big global lock to control block device accesses. On big SMP machines this becomes a real bottleneck. The patch I have moves that to one lock per block device (hard drive) and really speeds things up. The other patch I wrote over that time converted the scsi bottom half handler to a softirq instead. Now, if I can just get Marcelo to tell me how he wants patches submitted, I’m going to post these for upstream inclusion this time. He might or might not take them, but that’s his decision and no one can blame me for not posting them

But, since yesterday was so long, and so was the weekend, I kinda took it easy today, including going on the trip to take the dogs to Jordan Lake and let them swim after tennis balls and also finishing up the third book in the Anita Blake series, Circus of the Damned. That was a pretty good book, not as good as the first one, but still pretty good. Gonna be going to be early tonight, I can already tell.

Sometimes, in my long ago past, I used to think that weekends were for horsing around and the week was for work. Ever since I switched from construction to computers, that doesn’t seem to be the case. I think the fact that you can carry your work with you where ever you maygo makes it that much harder to put it down. It was patently impossible to take the construction job site home with me, so I didn’t have much choice then. Oh well, there are people waiting on my current project…time to get back to work.