diary at Telent Netowrks

On a train, on the way back from Alan & Telsa's, after my#

Thu, 28 Nov 2002 12:02:37 +0000

On a train, on the way back from Alan & Telsa's, after my spur-of-the-moment decision to go to the SWLUG meeting last night. A more informal gathering than OxLUG, held in a café then moved to the pub next door when it became obvious that there were more people present than would fit. Fun. Back to railway station for what is apparently fairly normal confusion over the timetable: "where's this train going?" "the board says `terminates'" "ok, where's Terminates, then?" -- got on a train that showed some sign of wanting to head in the right direction, and after it pulled out, the train manager walked through with a notepad polling the passengers for where they wanted to go. OK, possibly just for the entirely prosaic reason that some of the stops en route are basically request stops, but I think that explanation is less entertaining.

Today, tour of Swansea ("here's the castle, here's the sheep shop, here's the market, here's the marina, this is the beach") and introduction to Welshcakes. These can be approximately described as half-height dense scones, dusted with sugar

A few words about the progress of threading for SBCL, after my vague hints on Monday:

So far ...

  1. CL has dynamically scoped variables. Not, thank goodness, by default, but available. The semantics we've adopted are that (1) a symbol's global value can be set and is visible in all threads, and (2) it can also be dynamically bound: the dynamic binding is visible in only the thread that it was bound in. Other threads running concurrently still see and may also change the global value, but the thread that's bound the variable won't see those changes.

  2. This requires thread-local storage of some kind for the symbol values. On x86, we point to this with a segment register (%gs) as we're already using all the real registers. Each thread has a vector of values, and each symbol gains a tls-index slot which has its index symbol-value.

  3. Spent much of the weekend fiddling with modify_ldt, and teaching the sbcl assembler how to assemble instructions with segment override prefixes (in fact, I still need to go back to it and teach it how to disassemble them again)

  4. On Monday, I looked through the diffs from the previous round of hacking and forward-ported them - or at least, the bits that still made sense - into the current version. This was for formerly-global variables which are actually supposed to be per-thread (stack pointers and the like)

  5. On Tuesday, I had other unrelated work to do for, which I actually get paid (note to interested readers: if you would like to see a threaded SBCL sooner rather than later, I am available to implement this and other SBCL/CMUCL enhancements on a contract basis. Email me for details). Spent a couple of hours on various kinds of public transport thinking about symbol binding and unbinding

  6. Wednesday (yesterday) and today I wrote bind, unbind, set and symbol-value vops, and equivalent functionality in C (following a variation of the Extreme Programming methodologists' Once And Only Once principle known as "Once And Only Once More") for the bits of C code that need to do these things in situations where not enough of Lisp is running to use the normal vops. Then I debugged it. This is mostly a question of rebuilding, watching it segmentation fault, attaching gdb, disassembling, cursing, set disassemble intel, disassembling again, and scratching head. With intermissions for previously noted LUG meeting in Cardiff, and tour of Swansea.

    <dan_b> straw poll: how many special variables do we think that sbcl binds during cold init?
    <dan_b> I think 4096 sounds like a lot
    <Krystof> I'd have been surprised to find that we had 4096 distinct special variables
    <Krystof> * (length (apropos-list "*"))
    <Krystof> 1055
    <dan_b> hmm
    [...]
    <dan_b> aha.  got it, i think
    <dan_b>       (storew tls-index symbol symbol-tls-index-slot other-pointer-lowtag)
    <dan_b> having assigned a new tls index for the symbol, it would help if we actually stored it in the symbol strcuture for next time
    

    Right now work is paused, because recompiling takes an hour and eats battery life, and I'm on a train. So, time out to write diary and plan the next bit.

    (The next bit will actually be integration with the allocator and garbage collector, given that right now it would be completely unsafe for two threads to cons at once)

    Ext3 errors continue (though no panics today yet, at least) even with the new kernel, so that's not the problem. Would blame hardware except that there's none of the usual scary messages from the ide driver. Maybe a filesystem integrity problem caused (I'm guessing here) by apm forced shutdown when battery low, at a time that the disk was being written to, and not fully fixed by subsequent fscks. Tempted to try mkfs and reinstall (it's the root disk, not /home or anything important), and see if that helps. I probably have a lot of old config files, orphaned library packages and other similar stuff anyway, and it would be nice to get rid of them.