Third time lucky?

Last time we met, my PhD supervisor told me to expect to spend a long time making things that didn’t work: it

Crashed payphone — Linux kernel panic (Photo credit: sethschoen)

certainly feels like that right now.

My current task is to build a logical model of a working memory allocation scheme for a NoC.

I started with some Groovy, then realised that was going nowhere – how could I test these Groovy classes? I could write a DSL, but that felt like I’d be putting all the effort into the wrong thing.

My next thought was – write some new system calls for an experimental Linux kernel. Well, that has proved to be a pain – writing system calls is a bit of a faff (and nowhere does it seem to be fully documented – for a current kernel as opposed to a 2.2 one! – presumably because nobody should really be writing new Linux system calls anyway and so its knowledge best confined to the high priests of the cult) and testing it is proving to be even more difficult: it’s inside a VM or nothing.

Then I thought this afternoon – why bother with the kernel anyway – if I wrote a userland replacement for malloc that allocated from a fixed pool that should work just as well – so that is what I am about to try.

Related articles

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• Netflix Open Sources Groovy-based Amazon SWF Tool (architects.dzone.com)
• What is Groovy? (wtanaka.com)
• Java memory leak (javax0.wordpress.com)

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