Author Archives: Chris Samuel

Microsoft Hypervisor Code to be Removed from 2.6.33 ?

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Chris Smart has pointed out an interesting little titbit in Greg K-H’s “Staging tree status for the .32 kernel merge” blog post:

hv (Microsoft Hyper-V) drivers. Over 200 patches make up the massive cleanup effort needed to just get this code into a semi-sane kernel coding style (someone owes me a bit bottle of rum for that work!) Unfortunately the Microsoft developers seem to have disappeared, and no one is answering my emails. If they do not show back up to claim this driver soon, it will be removed in the 2.6.33 release. So sad…

So after all that hope about MS releasing GPL’d code it turns out to be a one off code dump (presumably to get them out of a license violation hole otherwise they’d be showing more interest) with no intention of doing anything further with it.. πŸ™

Great Quote on Early Computing

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Found this great quote whilst reading up more about Alan Turing being the first person to really comprehend what a modern computer would be like, a quote by Howard Aiken (of Harvard Mark I fame) in 1956 (the year after Turing’s death):

If it should turn out that the basic logics of a machine designed for the numerical solution of differential equations coincide with the logics of a machine intended to make bills for a department store, I would regard this as the most amazing coincidence that I have ever encountered.

Luckily Turing was right and he was wrong.. πŸ˜‰

UK Government Apologises to Alan Turing

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55 years after Alan Turing, one of the fathers of modern computing and one of the intellectual powerhouses behind the achievements of Bletchley Park, committed suicide following his conviction for “gross indecency” for being gay and his subsequent exile from GCHQ the UK Prime Minister has apologised for his treatment.

Turing was a quite brilliant mathematician, most famous for his work on breaking the German Enigma codes. It is no exaggeration to say that, without his outstanding contribution, the history of World War Two could well have been very different. He truly was one of those individuals we can point to whose unique contribution helped to turn the tide of war. The debt of gratitude he is owed makes it all the more horrifying, therefore, that he was treated so inhumanely. In 1952, he was convicted of Γ’β‚¬Λœgross indecencyÒ€ℒ – in effect, tried for being gay. His sentence – and he was faced with the miserable choice of this or prison – was chemical castration by a series of injections of female hormones. He took his own life just two years later. […] weÒ€ℒre sorry, you deserved so much better.

The BBC has a good article on Turing, his persecution and the apology.

Alan, we all owe you a massive debt of gratitude for all your work and I’m very sorry the UK treated you so very cruelly. We cannot right those wrongs, all we can hope to do is to learn from them and try to not let them be repeated.

(Heard via an InsideHPC blog)

Ext4 fall down go boom

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After a reboot today whilst installing KDE 4.3.1 I noticed the following messages in my kernel (2.6.31-rc8) logs (courtesy of the KDE file watcher that was following /var/log/kern.log):

Sep 6 13:53:10 quad kernel: [ 142.842723] EXT4-fs error (device dm-7): ext4_mb_generate_buddy: EXT4-fs: group 287: 5812 blocks in bitmap, 5418 in gd
Sep 6 13:53:11 quad kernel: [ 143.452041] JBD: Spotted dirty metadata buffer (dev = dm-7, blocknr = 0). There's a risk of filesystem corruption in case of system crash.
Sep 6 13:53:11 quad kernel: [ 143.486915] JBD: Spotted dirty metadata buffer (dev = dm-7, blocknr = 0). There's a risk of filesystem corruption in case of system crash.
Sep 6 13:53:11 quad kernel: [ 143.486942] JBD: Spotted dirty metadata buffer (dev = dm-7, blocknr = 0). There's a risk of filesystem corruption in case of system crash.

That didn’t look too good, so I immediately did a “git pull” and happily found 2.6.31-rc9 was out so built that and then did a dual backup, rsync’ing to my local ZFS-FUSE drive (which takes snapshots so I can go backwards in time) and also an rsnapshot to a USB external disk. Then with trepidation I rebooted and found myself looking at an fsck error on /home due to shared blocks between an image and part of my local clone of Linus’s kernel git tree (d’oh!). Whilst the fsck got the filesystem mountable again it did result in not being able to view the kernel git tree due to missing files so I decided it was far safer to just revert to my latest backup, which worked like a charm (phew!).

Moral of the story – keeping backups is good – keeping lots of backups is even better, especially when running with release candidate kernels! πŸ˜‰

Charlie Stross on Mercy, Al Megrahi and America

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A very eloquent blog post from Charlie Stross on the kerfuffle over the release of Al Megrahi, mercy and the US.

Even if Al Megrahi is a mass-murderer, the fact remains that he is dying. It is long-standing policy in Scotland to exercise the prerogative of mercy when possible; in general, if an imprisoned criminal is terminally ill, a request for release (for hospice care, basically) is usually granted unless they are believed to be a danger to the public.

That’s because the justice system isn’t solely about punishment. It’s about respect for the greater good of society, which is better served by rehabilitation and reconcilliation than by revenge. We do not make ourselves better people by exercising a gruesome revenge on the bodies of our vanquished foes.

Well worth reading!

(Via Jim)