As part of the 4.6 and 4.7 development cycles, several of us from IBM & SUSE finally got all the pieces lined up to enable kernel live patching for ppc64le.

If you're not familiar with kernel live patching, there's a pretty good write-up at Wikipedia. But the basic idea …

A while back I bought Dad an iRiver E150 so he could make audio recordings of my grandparents. It's quite a nice little device and had been doing a fairly good job for a few months, but then all of a sudden some of the recordings wouldn't play.

To cut …

As Jeremy mentioned, the IBM QS22 was released a few weeks ago. The QS22 is the newest Cell processor based blade server, sporting the new PowerXCell 8i chip, and up to 32 GB of memory.

Because the QS22 can support larger amounts of memory, Linux needs to enable the IOMMU …

Phew. If you haven't seen or heard from me in the past few weeks, it's cause I was flat out preparing for linux.conf.au, aka LCA.

I foolishly chose a talk topic which is entirely open-ended, it can never be finished, leading to me spending endless days and nights …

In a comment to one of my previous posts, "TimC" asks if the performance of my simple raytracer is "anywhere near realtime".

At the moment it's certainly not, although there is definitely the potential for it.

I haven't spent much effort on optimising the ray tracing algorithm, because I'm more …

Getting somewhere ..

Running live on the PS3, rendering straight to the frame buffer.

With next year's Linux conference fast approaching I realised that I didn't really have anything to do a talk about. I've done plenty of work in the last year, but it's all been pretty dull kernel internals, nothing with any wow factor. Mostly just a zzzz factor.

Ever since I …

I spent most of last week chasing a bug in the as yet unreleased 2.6.11 kernel. I hit it originally while testing some code I've been writing to implement a mem=X boot-time option. After 2-3 hours of running LTP the box would drop into xmon.

Just for …