- Contract Paused Due to Health Issues
- Bits and Pieces: The Small BCardLayout
- Lesson 22: A First (Bigger) Project
- API Design is Hard, Finding Bugs (Can be Made) Easy!
- The Haiku Tutorial is Here!
- From Bugs back to Wireless and Friends
- Greetings (mostly) from the Kernel (Debugging Land)
- 2011 Google Code-In Contest, Haiku Selected as One of Eighteen Participating Organzations
- Virtualize a Physical Haiku Partition With Virtualbox
- BeGeistert 024 + Coding sprint report
Something's cooking
Just like Austin Powers, I'm back, baby!
(Except that I wasn't kept locked in a cryochamber for 30 years. I managed to escape after only two. ;))
So, to paraphrase and one-up Duke Nukem (hope you too escape the chamber sooner rather than later, mate!), let's roll!
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Comments
Re: Something's cooking
Welcome back and Rock&Roll! ;)
Re: Something's cooking
You never cease to amaze me. Your blog posts are either Bible-long theoretical dissertations of stuff that never materializes or short blurbs that you may think are cute but that are pretty lame, pointless and even off-topic (and you either use a disproportionate number of tags -- counted 12 of them in one! -- or none, like on this post...
The Haiku Blog-O-Sphere is not your personal playground. How about you don't waste precious website space (and people's reading time) by sticking to the topic of Haiku-related stuff that is real and/or informative?
Re: Something's cooking
You never cease to amaze me.
Gee, thanks!
Your blog posts are either Bible-long theoretical dissertations of stuff that never materializes or short blurbs that you may think are cute but that are pretty lame, pointless and even off-topic (and you either use a disproportionate number of tags -- counted 12 of them in one! -- or none, like on this post...
Uh... So that was not a compliment?
The Haiku Blog-O-Sphere is not your personal playground. How about you don't waste precious website space (and people's reading time) by sticking to the topic of Haiku-related stuff that is real and/or informative?
Okay, just so that we're on the same page here, you really decided to go personal and throw low blows. Usually this is a game where both parties lose, but I'll play anyway.
*You*, sir, never cease to amaze me. *You*'re the one who threaten to leave the community unless people accept your visions for marketing Haiku as gospel. You're the one who threw a tantrum fit, promised to leave and then came back silently only to months later act as blog police. Really, this has got to be your all-time low. Good news is, now you have nowhere else to go but up. Been there. Feels good to get out of the tarpit. You'll see.
Yes, twelve tags. None of them off-topic, and as far as I can tell tags are *meant* to make it easy to search for subjects of interest. All of them were touched on my previous posts, or at least I meant to. The one about CFS is missing, I will concede that. But you sure read my piece on the CFS on the mailing lists. And yes, long-winded technical posts are... long-winded. And technical. And I was completely oblivious of the alleged scarcity of website space, as you'll find plenty of discussions lenghtier and orders of magnitude more technically all the time on LKML. Pardon my indelicacy, I'd think that when things don't interest you or go over your head the back/close/delete buttons are only a click away. I was not aware that I *must* water those things down for an audience I'm not even trying to reach.
So, please, what was your argument again? Do you even have one or I can chalk this up to bad hair day?
Man, frankly. What the f---? You do have my personal email. What's it with chastising me in public?
I think I'm too naive, because I thought that you above all people would understand what it is like to burn out, take an absence of leave, and then come back with a clearer mind and a sense of restored faith in your heart. *STUPID ME*, how could I ever even consider enjoying myself now that the (metaphorical) rainy days are over? Of course can't make one playful blog post, lest I ruin your perfect stormy Thursday. Boo, hiss, frown. I'm so sorry.
I think I'm too naive, because just last week I logged on IRC and *thought* that you were welcoming me back when you said hi. Little did I know that you were just sharpening your fangs ready to strike.
Uh, sorry if this sounded lame. I'm not nearly as good with Internet drama as you. You know, I only go downward-spiral mode when we're forced to move out because mom was on the verge of losing the house out of being indebted, since our government has refused for over ten years now to pay her the fair salary that she's owed; ten years she's been suing the State. She's already won the cause, but it's still at least two years before she receives the money. It's too late now, anyway. We've already moved out. And moved on.
So now you have some perspective on how fucked up was my life in the last two years, and perhaps you can now imagine what was done with the GSoC money (hint: not spent in Vegas). I'm definitely not nearly as sophisticated or qualified as you to produce factoids or to take enjoyment in watching the fall-out. Maybe I'm not entitled to real-world depression. Actually, I just might not be, indeed -- I might just be a brute, stupid third-world mixed race hillbilly latino dork of a kid who has no idea what the real (?!) adult life is like. Perhaps I should have taken my ball and gone home instead of promising to come back as soon as I felt I had solid ground to stand on. Perhaps I lacked flare. Perhaps I should have pretended nothing happened, that words weren't spoken, that people weren't let down, specially yours truly. I've spoken openly about this before. Maybe I shouldn't have let anyone take a peek inside my personal life. But I figured the cat's out of the bag now, no point in faking a pose of being a well-balanced, pondered, stable lad. I figure I just don't know any better anyway.
Who knows. Maybe you. Maybe you do know better after all. So, once again, I'm sorry if I violated your high etiquette by making a lighthearted joke on my comeback post. I'll try to respect your feelings next time, Mr. Spleenful.
"Pardonnez-moi, les gaffes et les problèmes / Que j'aurais pu causer, malgré moi j'répare la peine / Attristé par la vue de la réalité quotidienne..."
Re: Something's cooking
Jorge G. Mare probably meant that this blog is for the purpose of Haiku, and not for you to tell your life. For that there are many blogging and micro-blogging platforms all around the web.
You can express your joy to come back on IRC, nobody is going to contradict you, and many will be happy.
Regarding tags, 12 tags don't ease the search. :) People generally suggest no more than 10 tags per article ( even if your post is long ).
Re: Something's cooking
Hello, Maxime,
Jorge G. Mare probably meant that this blog is for the purpose of Haiku, and not for you to tell your life. For that there are many blogging and micro-blogging platforms all around the web.
No, he meant what he wrote. There are countless ways of expressing the meaning you suppose he tried to convey, but he chose to be bitter and abrasive. So my position stands.
Also, that was not a single sentence on that blog post that was "personal" per se. It was really a status update! What could possibly be cooking if not the scheduler? Cupcakes?
I don't blog or microblog. Each and every time I felt that I needed to say something personal, I did that *as a status update* as per why my *task* got so *delayed*. My reply to Jorge was, on the other hand, as personal and vitriolic as it gets. Jorge has implied before that I *stole* money from Haiku. I chose to ignore it back then, but now he hit a soft spot. So, if I'm keeping up with my word, now I'm disappointing him that I didn't live up to the image of a thief that he made of me? Of course that got me furious.
You can express your joy to come back on IRC, nobody is going to contradict you, and many will be happy.
Again: meant as a status update.
Still: Point taken.
Regarding tags, 12 tags don't ease the search. :) People generally suggest no more than 10 tags per article ( even if your post is long ).
Okay; perhaps that was exaggerated. I used tags as keywords, just like when you're submitting an article for an actual journal. But the tone of the posts probably sent a different message. Perhaps I should have adopted a more serious stance from the beginning and submitted those as actual developer articles. Thing is, it was never my intention to sound like a smart ass. Be's own newsletter articles were never drab. I never thought that trying to break the ice by using some humour and references to pop culture could be prejudicial; there was some precedent.
Thanks for the advice.
Re: Something's cooking
But you sure read my piece on the CFS on the mailing lists. And yes, long-winded technical posts are... long-winded. And technical.
Long winded is certainly right, but technical not so much, buzzwords and name checking don't constitute "technical".
Some software projects are characterised as "Code is King". You write software, first and foremost. People who want to argue that you're doing it wrong are welcome to provide a patch that shows how to fix it. There are a lot of successful Code is King projects to point at.
One of the advantages of Code is King projects over something like Haiku is that they don't tend to attract people like André or Michael Crawford. But for GSOC, Haiku were in a position to do something about André. Let's have a quote from June 2007:
“I don't need to write a single line of code to already state without a single shadow of doubt that my scheduler is WAY less complex and achieves most of the benefits of CFS with much smaller overhead.”
That should have been a massive red flag. When André wrote that, there was still time to intervene. His GSOC mentor should have been in conference right away, with André and other mentors to get him back on track. There was no way it made sense to green light his interim payment without ensuring he'd refocused onto something do-able and was actually writing code. Leaving him to write ever more fanciful claims about his non-existent scheduler was a recipe for disaster.
Re: Something's cooking
No mention of all of the foul language in his post?
Re: Something's cooking
One of the advantages of Code is King projects over something like Haiku is that they don't tend to attract people like André or Michael Crawford. But for GSOC, Haiku were in a position to do something about André. Let's have a quote from June 2007:
“I don't need to write a single line of code to already state without a single shadow of doubt that my scheduler is WAY less complex and achieves most of the benefits of CFS with much smaller overhead.”
That should have been a massive red flag. When André wrote that, there was still time to intervene. His GSOC mentor should have been in conference right away, with André and other mentors to get him back on track.
Stop right there. Context.
First: I used some colourful language, indeed, and I'm done with that now. It brought much more trouble than I could *ever*, ever anticipate.
Second: every claim I made, each and every one of them, was backed by 1) tech articles and papers, 2) writings by other scheduler authors, 3) verifiable mathematical models. So I left a very real trace explaining everything I was doing and the reasoning behind it. Hardly smoke and mirrors.
On the other hand, some of the models I came up with were flawed (the second and the third, which was the one discussed on the previous posts), some were stupid (the first), and each time I screwed up I was the first to admit, either here or on the mailing list. That should at least demonstrate that I have gone great lengths to verify each model extensively before submitting any bogus code.
Third: the claim you quoted was based on the usage of data structures alone. When you minimise comparisons between elements, you minimise complexity on the time axis, usually by trading it for larger usage on the space axis (the space-time tradeoff is well known in Computer Science, which you probably know). This claim was made out of using a balanced tree whose height would definitely be shallower than CFS's for all but trivial workloads.
A red-black tree has a worst-case height of ceil(2*log2(n+1)) where n is the number of nodes. The maximum number of nodes on CFS is Linux's MAX_PID, currently defined to 32k. ceil(2*log2 (32768+1)) = 31. The tree on the "scheduler without a name" deals with a maximum of 100 nodes per non-realtime scheduling class. Currently there is only realtime and non-realtime on Haiku, so ceil(2*log2 (100+1)) = 14. With two scheduling classes, that is, non-rt and non-rt interactive, it goes to 200 nodes, thus ceil(2*log2 (200+1)) = 16. Let's go wild and use postulate five scheduling classes so we have plenty of headroom; let's even round it up to a power of two. Then ceil(2*log2 (512+1)) = 19. Boot Linux and you'll see over 100 threads from the get-go (2.6.27-gentoo-r8, Gnome desktop: 135 threads), that is, get them all active and you'll have a 15-deep rbtree. On a freshly-booted Haiku system, I counted 102 threads but 14 nodes, giving us a depth of 8. So, under the same conditions, we're shallower, both in theory and practice.
As you see, this is not slander towards CFS, this is math.
That's for the data structure alone. That combined with the fact the code logic itself is much tighter than CFS, with only few and predictable branches, and that all memory is allocated compactly for better cache usage, makes my claim not far-fetched at all. I said it was simpler and had most of the benefits as in a fine 80/20 solution where the hardest 20% don't even apply to Haiku anyway, and not that I have a magic hat to pull a scheduler from. Finally, as I reiterated, CFS is analogous to stride scheduling. The code discussed on the first 5 sets of posts was analogous to hierarchical stride scheduling. The code of the fourth model is pretty much a modifier HSS proper. HSS is more efficient and spreads tasks more evenly than plain SS. Don't believe me, go straight to Waldspurger.
Fourth: the third model, which was the one discussed on the previous posts, was flawed as well. That was the model on which I based the code *submitted* for GSoC evaluation. That code, however, was not coding guidelines-compliant and missed a few important elements that I would implement soon after GSoC was over. It was not included on the kernel for those reasons, *not* for being vapourware. It turned out that as the code neared completion I noticed something was just not right with it, no matter how it was tweaked. Then real life intervened and threw me out of the loop. Which had the upside of having me evaluate the whole of it and determine what was wrong, namely the fact that by using coprime strides alone I couldn't determine a way to keep the proportions as threads entered and left the scheduling ring (which, as you might remember, was modelled by a rb_tree of intervals).
The fourth model then revisits hierarchical stride scheduling, and to validate it I wrote a prototype in Lua, which I had posted on the mailing list.
To sum it up: it was delayed by a lot, and all the things I said were never meant as *excuses*, but *explanations* for the delays. I was undone, and I'm genuinely sorry, heartbroken and ashamed of it all happening while I was doing work for Haiku. That doesn't mean I stopped working on it or that it's vapour, not by a *long* shot. The work I've done has become my graduation dissertation. At the very least it got reviewed by a couple of Ph.D.s. It is real, it will be delivered, and that's what's cooking.
Re: Something's cooking
daeeeeeeeee
bem vindo de volta velhinho!
Re: Something's cooking
Hey André,
I mean what I write, nothing more, nothing less; there is really nothing between the lines so, stop looking. :) If you read my comment carefully, you would see that it was just about your blog posts, and that I never made any accusations about you being a thief (I do think your GSoC 07 behaviour was quite shameless though), nor did my comment ever had a racial or discriminatory connotation of any kind (I am also from a third world country, and both my kids and grandchildren are mixed race). All that stuff is just impulsive babbling on your side.
Anyway, in case you did not understand what I meant to say, I will put it in layman terms:
1) Please, use the Haiku blog just like everyone else, that is, for *real* and *informative* Haiku-related stuff, and not for theoretical dissertations that border delusions of grandeur or personal rants that are not related to the project (we all have real life problems, but we don't write about them here).
2) Use a reasonable number of tags (3 or 4 at most) for your posts; the idea is not to improve the ranking of your posts, but to show posts that are relevant against searches on the website.
Point taken on my leaving the project repeatedly and then coming back. On that topic, I would tell you: "You may laugh at my expense. I deserve it." Hmmm... who was that said that? :P
Oh, and for once, I agree with NoHaikuForMe. :)
Jorge (who would love to see André's super duper scheduler claims become a reality, and I really mean this)
Re: Something's cooking
Hey André,
Hello,
I mean what I write, nothing more, nothing less; there is really nothing between the lines so, stop looking. :) If you read my comment carefully, you would see that it was just about your blog posts,
and that I never made any accusations about you being a thief
Not what I heard through the grapevine. And believe me, if anything it only amplified my wish of completing this thing. I'm not a dishonest person.
(I do think your GSoC 07 behaviour was quite shameless though)
No, quite the opposite, I take a ton of shame on that. But I never gave up.
nor did my comment ever had a racial or discriminatory connotation of any kind (I am also from a third world country, and both my kids and grandchildren are mixed race). All that stuff is just impulsive babbling on your side.
But that was just irony :P You know, the Argentinian-Brazilian rivalry.
Anyway, in case you did not understand what I meant to say, I will put it in layman terms:
1) Please, use the Haiku blog just like everyone else, that is, for *real* and *informative* Haiku-related stuff, and not for theoretical dissertations
Those are both real and informative. Might not suit your tastes, though.
that border delusions of grandeur
I'm so going to make you eat crow :D
or personal rants that are not related to the project (we all have real life problems, but we don't write about them here).
That was *not* what I did. The "young offender" post (a song by New Order, go read the lyrics) basically said "I've been silent for a ridiculously long time but I intend to correct it soon". The "wooshing deadlines" post was me apologising ten days later and admitting to have missed all possible deadlines, guilty as charged; and trying to provide some context on what the hell was happening. I thought I owed an apology *and* an explanation. Don't interpret it as me blowing some steam in public.
2) Use a reasonable number of tags (3 or 4 at most) for your posts; the idea is not to improve the ranking of your posts, but to show posts that are relevant against searches on the website.
I already explained why I did that, and I see the mistake now. I was not SEOing my posts.
Point taken on my leaving the project repeatedly and then coming back. On that topic, I would tell you: "You may laugh at my expense. I deserve it." Hmmm... who was that said that? :P
If you remember well I defended you on the handful of discussions that led to your absence. And I certainly welcomed you back, if not in public words, in my own heart and mind.
But boy you do get big-headed some times. And me too. Latin blood, I guess? :)
Jorge (who would love to see André's super duper scheduler claims become a reality, and I really mean this)
Well, perhaps it's not only the scheduler that's cooking, but a fine dish of crow as well. ;)
So are we back to friendly terms? :)
Re: Something's cooking
So are we back to friendly terms? :)
I have no animosity against you. Let's say that I was thinking out loud (so that you could hear me)...
Nothing would make me happier than being proven wrong here. If you ever release a super duper scheduler for Haiku that works as you have been advertising all this time, then I will eat not one but two boiled crows. :)
Re: Something's cooking
Welcome back André!
I thought Koki had left the building?
Play around on these pages I say, hopefully your lines of blogpost match up with the lines of code on Haiku you deliver ;-)
Don't get lost in a flame with Koki, it's his kick.
Re: Something's cooking
I would like to add my two cents and say that later is indeed better than never. If you can deliver a good scheduler within the next few months, a lot of people will be happy. In an ideal world it would have been nice if that was done for GSoC 2007, but alas that is not to be and we should all just stop worrying about it.
I certainly can understand where you are coming from because I did the first port of WebKit to Haiku in 2007 as well, and here were are a year and a half later and it is finally getting worked on again, but mostly my Maxime Simon, with thanks for Google for the GSoC. I don't think I have any better excuses than you do (I'm sure your circumstances were much worse), but like you I cannot go back in time and bust butt to have a nice WebKit-based browser running by now. Hopefully Maxime and I can put together something decent before the summer ends.
Anyhow this is supposed to be about you, not me. I'm just showing that you are not alone on such things. Heck in many ways the whole Haiku project is like this. Many of the Haiku developers expected or wanted an alpha release many years ago. We aren't there yet, but progress is being made each day and frankly I think our *alpha* will be better than most betas!
Finally, let me give you some advice I have learned the hard way: we all want to change the world and produce something really good the first time around, but in reality most great things are created gradually. In other words don't try to make the perfect scheduler right from the beginning. How about just make something that is better than Haiku's current scheduler, but maybe not as good as CFS or whatever you want to compare to. Don't try to beat Linux or CFS or whatever, just make something that is better for Haiku.