One thing that caught my interest lately was the implementation of hash
tables, particularly the algorithms we are currently using for
calculating the hash value. In kmod we use Paul Hsieh’s hash function,
self entitled superfast hash. I fell troubled with anything that
entitles itself as super fast, especially given the benchmarks
provided are from some
years ago, with older CPUs.
After some time spent on benchmarking and researching I realized there
were much more things to look after than just the hash function. With
this post I try to summarize my findings, showing some numbers. However
do take …
I’m back from USA after one week attending Linux Plumbers Conference.
This was my first time in LPC, in which I was part of the CoreOS,
talking about “From libabc to libkmod: writing core libraries”.
It was a very good experience and I’m glad to meet so many developers,
both kernel and userspace hackers. Some of them I only knew from IRC,
mailing-lists, etc and it was great time to share our experiences,
discuss the current problems in Linux and even fix bugs :-). We seem
finally to have reached a consensus on how module signing should be done …
Hey, kmod 3 is out. Really nice to finish this release. I was hoping to
have it between the holidays, but there were some major bugs pending.
It’s nice to see udev from git already using it instead of calling
modprobe for each module. Kay reported a hundred less forks on bootup
after start using libkmod and libblkid.
It’s nice too receive feedback about other architectures that we don’t
have access, too. With kmod 3, sh4 joined the other architectures that
were tested with kmod.
Since I’m already doing the announcements to the mailing lists, I …
I’m glad to announce the second version of kmod. I’m sorry for
not sending the first version to the mailing lists. Now I’m both writing
it here and sending to the mailing list.
I thank very much the feedback received for the first version and
that now Jon Masters, the maintainer of module-init-tools, is helping
us with kmod and already announced that kmod will
replace module-init-tools in
future.
I’d like to especially thank Tom Gundersen, Dave Reisner, Marco d’Itri,
Jon Masters, Luis Strano, Jan Engelhardt and Kay Sievers who have been
extensively testing kmod and …
So, in last post I said kmod 2 could be released sooner than expected if
there were major bugs. Not as much as a surprise, there was 1: depending
on the alias passed to the lookup function we were blocked iterating a list.
It’s now fixed in git tree. Thanks to Ulisses Furquim for fixing it and
Dave Reisner for the bug report. We already have some other great stuff
implemented so we’ll soon have another release.
Another great news is that now we have the maintainer of
module-init-tools (Jon Masters) cooperating with us. We will discuss how …