My ADSL line was opened yesterday, so I am back on the Internet! Actually during the last two months, I still had an Internet connection, but only though a 56k modem, not really useable for maintaining Debian packages or for doing an "apt-get upgrade" on my machines (and a bit costly).

I am in my apartment for a month, and it tooks two weeks to get the invoice of my telephone line, one more week to get the ADSL line and one more week to get my modem from the post.

The connection is an ADSL2+ connection, so there is enough upload rate to be able to host websites. I moved all my websites to my home server, and I am just waiting the activation of the reverse DNS to be able to host an SMTP server.

Yesterday I moved to my new apartement. Moving was not really easy as it was running cats and dogs. The apartement now looks a bit empty, as I currently only have a camping mattress, a sleeping bad, a few clothing, without forgetting my computers... I need to buy a mattress, a fridge, solid plates, etc.

In the next few days, I'll have to open a telephone line, with an ADSL connection. I hope it wouldn't take too much time, as it's not very easy to only have an Internet access at work. That's why I am not so active into Debian by now, though I am still reading my mails and uploading packages.

Yesterday I switched all of my machines but one to kernel 2.6. The last one to migrate is a SparcStation 4. It is a little bit complicated as the BIOS refuse to recognize my hard-drive since I changed it from a 2.1GB one to a 9.1GB. After an afternoon of tests, I decided to boot this workstation via the network, as the Linux kernel recognizes it.

Using a 2.4 kernel was very easy, you just have to convert the Debian kernel in aout format using zcat and elftoaout. For a 2.6 kernel, it is a little more complicated as Debian ships them with an initrd image. After a few minutes searching google, I found the solution:

zcat /boot/vmlinuz > vmlinux
elftoaout -o netboot.img vmlinux piggyback netboot.img /boot/System.map /boot/initrd.img

It seems to work well, however the image is 271,654,944 bytes long. I still don't understand why.

I decided to switch all my machines to kernel 2.6. I now consider the kernel 2.6 stable enough, at least for the use of my machines. Except for my workstation on which I like to add some patches, I am using Debian kernels for my other machines. Moreover some of them are very slow (a parisc@60 MHz and a sparc@110 MHz), and building a kernel on such machines takes very long time.

I started with my a backup server, it was very easy, apt-get install and voilà!

Then I switched my firewall. It was not so easy as for my backup server, as I only have a 256 MB disk (actually a compact flash card). Because of its size, it was not possible to have two kernels at the same time on the disk. I decided to remove the old 2.4 kernel (/boot and /lib/modules), to install the new 2.6 kernel. Then I typed reboot, and started to pray. As I don't have neither a display nor a keyboard on that machine, I started to look both at the hard disk's LED and at a console on my workstation on which I started ping fourier. After a some time (I don't know exactly how much, in such situations seconds are like minutes), there was some echo reply. Wonderful!

After such successes, I decided to continue and to switch my hppa machine. Again apt-get, then a quick look at the palo's documentation to know how to specify an initrd image, and then reboot. After a lot of time, it was still not possible to ping the machine. Shit! PALO has the possibilty to specify an alternate kernel in case of a problem, however in that case it seems it has failed... or the boot was mabe successfull. Half an hour later, after I plugged a screen, a keyboard and a null-modem serial cable, I understood the problem: the module for the network card was not loaded (whereas it was directly binded into the 2.4 kernel). And hotplug doesn't load it as it is not on a PCI bus. I tooked my keyboard and started to write my login. Nothing. The keyboard's module was also not loaded. I switched back to the 2.4 kernel, I put a lot of modules into /etc/modules (network card, keyboard, mouse, sound card, parallel port, serial port, etc.). And it worked!

Moral: Don't change your kernel when you only have very few time to do that. It always take a lot longer than expected.

Today, I spent all the day fixing gcc-m68hc1x. It is gcc built for cross-compiling to 68HC11 and 68HC12 microcontrollers. There was a strange bug: an ICE on 64-bit hosts. Actually the bug was there for a long time, but I had decided that the version currently in testing will be enough. However, yesterday a bug was filled as a package need to build it was not available anymore in testing.

So I started to try to debug it. It was the first time I was looking at gcc's sources. Whow! I didn't know were to start to find the bug. I asked on IRC on #gcc, but people were no encouraging me: "aurel32, that bug is not easy to tackle for newbies". I first reduced the file causing the ICE to a single line in a function, I added a lot of printf in gcc's sources, and then tried to compile the same testcase both on a 32-bit host and a 64-bit host. At the end of the day I found some differences, and with that, the bug!

As the ICE was triggered by the build of libgcc2, gcc-m68hc1x was unbuildable on 64-bit hosts. Now that this bug is fixed, it means one RC bug less.

And in short for any people writing code: please don't assume that a 64-bit number needs two int to be represented!