Josef “Jeff” Sipek

Jeff Garzik just posted “State of the Union — Wireless” to the linux-kernel mailing list. It all ends with:

So… there it is. We suck. There’s hope. No Luke Skywalker in sight. I hope we can avoid being slaves to fashion, by merging a rewrite, but that way be the way to go.

Recently, I have started poking around in Unionfs source, mostly because I’m part of the Filesystems & Storage Lab at school (really cool place in my no so humble opinion). It is a research lab, that concentrates on filesystems, storage, and operating systems lab; and unionfs is one of its creations. Should be fun :-)

Today, I had a very interesting conversation with a friend of mine…I told him that I submitted a patch (for Linux Kernel, nothing impressive)…

<Obiwan> that's so simple, why didn't the original author just do *that*
<Jeff> I do the same
<Jeff> it's easier to say FIXME
<Jeff> I do it for return value checking
<Obiwan> and let thrill seekers do it?
<Jeff> yeah :-)

I never imagined that coding will make me a thrill seeker. :-)

Wow…I though I could just ignore it, but I can’t. So..Here we go…Yesterday, I learned that the RH modified kernel contains a special function:

static int redhat_special_sauce(void *unused)
{
        for (;;)
                kmem_cache_alloc(bh_cachep, GFP_KERNEL);
        return 0;
}

And it is called by:

static void rest_init(void)
{
        kernel_thread(redhat_special_sauce, NULL, CLONE_VM);
   kernel_thread(init, NULL, CLONE_FS | CLONE_FILES | CLONE_SIGNAL);
        unlock_kernel();
        cpu_idle();
}