[gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[Robert Seaton]

Hi, all.

I spent about half of this week debugging a particularly nasty build
issue that I was bumping heads with. I eventually determined that the
problem was that I had canceled a Catalyst build when it was only
partially complete, which corrupted my entire build environment. This
corruption was silent, subsequent builds would complete seemingly
successfully, only would I find out at run-time that some packages had
been only partially emerged.

For the rest of the week, I focused on adding the finishing touches to
Plan 9 From Gentoo. It's now in a fairly usable state, the only
remaining thing to be done is to get Portage up and running on the
liveCD, as that was a feature mentioned by someone during my original
proposal and something that I assume the community would be interested
in having. I now have an introductory message on startup that
introduces new users to some of the userspace paradigms introduced by
Plan 9 (i.e. actually "drawing" a window on the screen) and, further,
the message points them to a number of resources where they can learn
more about the components shipped by Plan 9 From Gentoo.

In addition to working out some of the startup niceties, I wrote an
ebuild for the 9vx application and added that to the Glentoo overlay.
Plan 9 From Gentoo now ships with 9vx and a Plan 9 tree, so that users
can run Plan 9 VMs from Plan 9 From Gentoo's command line just by
executing the 9vx command. I think this is a pretty neat thing to have
and, hopefully, it will appease some of the Plan 9 natives who may be
put off by the remaining Linuxy goodness provided by Plan 9 From
Gentoo.

After this was accomplished, I began porting the Glendix patches to
the latest git kernel. I have everything in a build-able state, but it
still needs to be tested. In hindsight, I should have ported my
patches to the latest Gentoo kernel instead of the git release, as the
git kernels use a different style of ebuild and, which I found out in
testing a newly generated liveCD image with a git kernel, fail to
build correctly with Catalyst. Tomorrow, I will rebase my rebased
patches to a different release kernel (2.6.39.2 probably). Hopefully,
the patches will not exhibit any run time failures and I will be
sitting pretty. Rebasing the patches should not take long, but --
should there be run time failures -- debugging may take a day or two.

Once Glendix has been forward ported to a more recent kernel, I will
begin porting more syscalls from Plan 9 to the Linux kernel with the
goal of getting the native Plan 9 version of the sam editor running on
top of the Linux kernel and shipping with Plan 9 From Gentoo. I am
still waiting for Anant to get back to me with some more information
on porting the syscalls and how to move forward. If he has still not
gotten back to me by the time I am ready to begin work, I will once
again poke Robin about setting up a project page for Plan 9 From
Gentoo and getting space to host both the stage3 tarball of Plan 9
From Gentoo and the liveCD ISO. I may also see about taking over as
maintainer of (or just gaining access to) the Plan 9 overlay, as much
of my work in the Glentoo overlay should probably be moved to the Plan
9 overlay, seeing that it is useful for more than just my liveCD and
maybe some Gentoo-ers would like to permanently install plan9port or
similar on their machines.

I also must fill out my midterm report for Google at some point during
this week.

rps

Re: [gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 11:22 Sun 10 Jul     , Robert Seaton wrote:
> For the rest of the week, I focused on adding the finishing touches to
> Plan 9 From Gentoo. It's now in a fairly usable state, the only
> remaining thing to be done is to get Portage up and running on the
> liveCD, as that was a feature mentioned by someone during my original
> proposal and something that I assume the community would be interested
> in having. I now have an introductory message on startup that
> introduces new users to some of the userspace paradigms introduced by
> Plan 9 (i.e. actually "drawing" a window on the screen) and, further,
> the message points them to a number of resources where they can learn
> more about the components shipped by Plan 9 From Gentoo.

Nice work, Robert.

> After this was accomplished, I began porting the Glendix patches to
> the latest git kernel. I have everything in a build-able state, but it
> still needs to be tested. In hindsight, I should have ported my
> patches to the latest Gentoo kernel instead of the git release, as the
> git kernels use a different style of ebuild and, which I found out in
> testing a newly generated liveCD image with a git kernel, fail to
> build correctly with Catalyst. Tomorrow, I will rebase my rebased
> patches to a different release kernel (2.6.39.2 probably). Hopefully,
> the patches will not exhibit any run time failures and I will be
> sitting pretty. Rebasing the patches should not take long, but --
> should there be run time failures -- debugging may take a day or two.

Might be an easier backport if you make a local 
vanilla-sources-3.0-rc7.ebuild.

> Once Glendix has been forward ported to a more recent kernel, I will
> begin porting more syscalls from Plan 9 to the Linux kernel with the
> goal of getting the native Plan 9 version of the sam editor running on
> top of the Linux kernel and shipping with Plan 9 From Gentoo. I am
> still waiting for Anant to get back to me with some more information
> on porting the syscalls and how to move forward.

The idea here is to get all the native p9 apps running under a Linux kernel?

What's your plan for getting patches upstreamed? We do have a few kernel 
devs, so I recommend getting in touch with some of them to work on 
integrating things into Linus's tree.

> If he has still not gotten back to me by the time I am ready to begin 
> work, I will once again poke Robin about setting up a project page for 
> Plan 9 From Gentoo 

Seems like something that might make sense in 
http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/ — do you agree?

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux and X.Org
Blog: http://dberkholz.com


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Re: [gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[Robert Seaton]

>> For the rest of the week, I focused on adding the finishing touches to
>> Plan 9 From Gentoo. It's now in a fairly usable state, the only
>> remaining thing to be done is to get Portage up and running on the
>> liveCD, as that was a feature mentioned by someone during my original
>> proposal and something that I assume the community would be interested
>> in having. I now have an introductory message on startup that
>> introduces new users to some of the userspace paradigms introduced by
>> Plan 9 (i.e. actually "drawing" a window on the screen) and, further,
>> the message points them to a number of resources where they can learn
>> more about the components shipped by Plan 9 From Gentoo.
>
> Nice work, Robert.

Thanks!

>> Once Glendix has been forward ported to a more recent kernel, I will
>> begin porting more syscalls from Plan 9 to the Linux kernel with the
>> goal of getting the native Plan 9 version of the sam editor running on
>> top of the Linux kernel and shipping with Plan 9 From Gentoo. I am
>> still waiting for Anant to get back to me with some more information
>> on porting the syscalls and how to move forward.
>
> The idea here is to get all the native p9 apps running under a Linux kernel?

That's the eventual goal, but getting everything working will probably
take more work and time than the scope of my GSoC project. At any
rate, I intend to port as many Plan 9 syscalls as I can.

> What's your plan for getting patches upstreamed? We do have a few kernel
> devs, so I recommend getting in touch with some of them to work on
> integrating things into Linus's tree.

I'd be happy to talk to any kernel devs about what it would take to
get things merged upstream. Right now, I'm not sure if the project is
mature enough that it makes sense to merge things at right this
second, but it certainly would be a good idea in the future. Do you
have any developers in mind that I should get in contact with? At the
very least, I can make sure that I'm taking the right approach and, at
best, start work on getting things merged into mainline.

>> If he has still not gotten back to me by the time I am ready to begin
>> work, I will once again poke Robin about setting up a project page for
>> Plan 9 From Gentoo
>
> Seems like something that might make sense in
> http://www.gentoo.org/proj/en/gentoo-alt/ — do you agree?

Yup, looks like a perfect fit for Plan 9 From Gentoo.

Cheers,
rps

Re: [gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 10:38 Mon 18 Jul     , Robert Seaton wrote:
> Donnie Berkholz wrote:
> > What's your plan for getting patches upstreamed? We do have a few 
> > kernel devs, so I recommend getting in touch with some of them to 
> > work on integrating things into Linus's tree.
> 
> I'd be happy to talk to any kernel devs about what it would take to 
> get things merged upstream. Right now, I'm not sure if the project is 
> mature enough that it makes sense to merge things at right this 
> second, but it certainly would be a good idea in the future. Do you 
> have any developers in mind that I should get in contact with? At the 
> very least, I can make sure that I'm taking the right approach and, at 
> best, start work on getting things merged into mainline.

Sure, my recollection is that gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman) loves to work 
with new kernel contributors, and he's a Gentoo dev among other things. 
He's best reached by email, as he's not on IRC regularly.

Another option is Mike Frysinger (vapier), as he also contributes a fair 
bit upstream. Let me know if either of those people work out for you, 
and if they don't, I'm sure we can think of some more. Those are just 
the names that came to the top of my mind.

-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux and X.Org
Blog: http://dberkholz.com


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Re: [gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[Robert Seaton]

> Sure, my recollection is that gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman) loves to work
> with new kernel contributors, and he's a Gentoo dev among other things.
> He's best reached by email, as he's not on IRC regularly.
>
> Another option is Mike Frysinger (vapier), as he also contributes a fair
> bit upstream. Let me know if either of those people work out for you,
> and if they don't, I'm sure we can think of some more. Those are just
> the names that came to the top of my mind.

What are their emails? gregkh@gentoo.org and vapier@gentoo.org or
something else?

Thanks,
rps

Re: [gentoo-soc] Plan 9 From Gentoo: Weekly Status Report #7

[Donnie Berkholz]

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On 10:42 Thu 21 Jul     , Robert Seaton wrote:
> > Sure, my recollection is that gregkh (Greg Kroah-Hartman) loves to 
> > work with new kernel contributors, and he's a Gentoo dev among other 
> > things. He's best reached by email, as he's not on IRC regularly.
> >
> > Another option is Mike Frysinger (vapier), as he also contributes a 
> > fair bit upstream. Let me know if either of those people work out 
> > for you, and if they don't, I'm sure we can think of some more. 
> > Those are just the names that came to the top of my mind.
> 
> What are their emails? gregkh@gentoo.org and vapier@gentoo.org

Yep.
-- 
Thanks,
Donnie

Donnie Berkholz
Admin, Summer of Code
Gentoo Linux and X.Org
Blog: http://dberkholz.com


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