Hackweek V

I had been toying with the idea that, to split a file on my hard-disk, I have to read and write to a new file and then truncate the old file. But isn't it lots of unnecessary I/O. I already have all the data on disk. I should be able to change the meta-data alone and mark the file contents after some length as a different file.

So during this hackweek, I implemented 2 system calls on Linux, sys_split and sys_join. And added support for these calls to the FAT file-system. http://lkml.org/lkml/2010/6/9/200 With this patch one can split a file into 2 or join 2 files without doing much I/O!

Why FAT?
Normally creating a new file and then truncating a file approach, needs temporary free space as well. I once had a need to split files when there was no free space available. On advanced filesystems, sparse-file support(i.e., files with holes) helped. But FAT does not support sparse files. Also I wanted these to work on thumb drives which are mostly formatted as FAT32.

SLE11 SP1 release
This Hackweek was scheduled to follow the release of SLE11 SP1. And all the Bangalore employees, who worked for SLE11 SP1 were given a portable 160 hard-drive as a gift in the middle of hackweek. The transcend disk has a one-touch back up button, which works to sync selected folders, using a proprietary software available only on Windows. No support in Linux or Mac.

gnireenignE one-touch button

I thought, if the button press could be detected, I could use it to unmount the disk! So I set out to reverse engineer it. Usbmon + KVM + windows XP. Got the usbmon traces. I was expecting to see a simple Interrupt endpoint. But it was a bulk end-point only interface. And the software was continuously polling to get the button status. It was quite interesting to decipher the USBS and USBC's, but the SCSI/ATAPI payload had an unknown command DFh. And I assumed that by sending the command, if a button had been pressed in between, I would get a different value. And was trying hard for hours. But failed. Then took few more traces using Windows. Tried hard. When I almost gave up, I found couple of return bytes slightly different! Voila. The return value is different, only if the button is held down during the command. Now, I have a script to sync/unmount with a one-touch button! If you have this device, you can modify the script to do what ever you want it to do. Let your creativity flow freely.

GIT pull mishap and git clean

When I was doing a `git pull` from a remote repo, I ran out of disk space, which resulted in errors like

Updating ce8a742..faf80d6
error: git checkout-index: unable to write file drivers/usb/gadget/s3c-hsotg.c
error: git checkout-index: unable to write file drivers/usb/gadget/u_audio.c
error: git checkout-index: unable to write file drivers/usb/gadget/u_audio.h

Freed some disk space and re-ran the `git-pull`. But it failed saying

$ git pull
Updating ce8a742..faf80d6
error: Untracked working tree file 'Documentation/ABI/testing/sysfs-bus-pci-devices-cciss' would be overwritten by merge.

Some of the files were created by the previous pull, but they are considered untracked files as the previous pull failed. `git pull -f` didnt help as git was reluctant to delete my untracked files.

Deleting huge list of files one by one was a pain. I was thinking of doing a git status to get the list of untracked files and deleting them. But Jony rescued me by telling me about `git clean` which can delete all the untracked files!

But I would really like to see a way to pull/checkout and over-write the untracked files, so that other untracked files, which will not be over-written, need not be deleted. Is there a way to do it?

Linux Nikanth News (2)

After I posted Linux Nikanth News, the next LWN weekly edition's kernel page has Andrew Mortans reply to me as part of the Quotes of the week.

I was at the receiving end from the master for not writing good patch description. And I do not seem to have learned from it! :(

p.s: Earlier by mistake all of my posts were syndicated in planetsuse. Now it has been changed to aggregate posts with a specific label. Hopefully this post wont show up anywhere else other than in my blog. If you are seeing this elsewhere, please leave a comment.

Linux Nikanth News

I do not post many things related to computer science or what I do. So just to update some of my friends here are couple of LWN articles where I was mentioned.

I was mentioned for kreplace - hotpatching running kernel in Nov 24. And recently for the cgroup based oom killer controller Also note that both the projects were not merged in the Linus tree, at least not yet. ksplice is superior to kreplace and it seems to be on its way for inclusion, and user-space notification seems to be the preferred approach of oom killer control.

/me plans to blog more tech stuff soon