Friday, October 14, 2005

Hack-a-doodle-do

I am really feeling exuberant today.
The past few days were really crappy... partly cuz i was missing my friends on my bday(which was on 12th)

That brings me back to the point about my happiness. Well today i made my first working scheduler for FreeBSD. I wrote a scheduler which allocates fair share to each process, i.e. suppose a process asks a kernel for 10% of cpu time then my kernel ensures that it gets it. 2 weeks of messing with the process queues, strange priorities and deadly decays, and twitchy context switches eventually bore fruit. I am now a kernel hacker :D. I really love system coding.

Secondly I have discovered a few benifits of High speed internet that I had never experienced before. I got a new version of iTunes. Its incredible.

You can subsribe to podcasts and vodcasts like you subscribe to rss feeds. And you get new radio shows and TV shows. Its amazing!!! I mean who can imagine this in India with a puny bandwidth (max 128kbps Vs 11/54 Mpbs wireless). Moreover I will soon be getting a wireless router and will be converting my home to a wireless hotspot :) (psst...not that i m a rich bugger but its really cheap here and evrybody has it)... How many wireless hotspots are there in India?? The few available in IIMs and other institutes are publicised as if its something great.

And ya regarding those shows...they r absolutely free, just like rss feeds as i said. You can select the shows you want to download. I subscribed to a bollywood and a channel called system... downloaded a couple of countdown shows, and learned how to hack a iPod Nano, build a opensource HDTV capture tool. It really breaks my heart that there is no open source equivalent of iTunes though.

4 comments:

  1. Excellent job with that scheduler, by the way. Although I did a *little* more than just stamping my name next to yours :P. Just kidding.
    Yesterday I was thinking how similar this experience was with what I did in undergrad OS, where we had to make modifications to the NACHOS OS. I had to rely so much on my lab partner, who is more into Linux/Unix and all that cryptic stuff. You're kind of his replacement ;).

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  2. Oh come on... U should be knowing that coding is not a big deal if you have the design clear in your head. You helped a lot with the design. If u want me to enumerate then you were the one who suggested using the global variable in kern_fork.c and kern_exit.c instead of replenishing it after every timeframe, I would have been damned trying to figure out the race condition that would have occured.

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  3. Belated wishes man...I am so Jealous. Wi-Fi and the bandwidth....we will soon catch up man...So do you code in asm ??

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  4. Heh he..:D
    Thanx for the bday wish. And no I did not code in asm. I coded in C. The architecture of FreeBSD is totally machine independent (except few page mapping modules). Thats the beauty of it.
    The architecture is robust and totally object oriented. I guess you know that MS is planning to port their .NET platform to FreeBSD.

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