Development Setups

Development Setups

[Adam Keys]

As a budding kernel hacker looking to cut my teeth, I've become curious about 
what types of setups people hack the kernel with.  I am very interested in 
descriptions of the computers you hack the kernel with and their use patterns.

I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/compiling on, 
and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I would not risk losing data 
if I oops or somesuch.  Alternately, is there a common practice of using lilo 
to create development and testing kernel command lines?  Is this a useful 
thing to do or is it too much of brain drain to switch between hacking and 
testing mindsets?

Instead of having separate machines,  there is the possibility of using the 
Usermode port.  As I understand it this lags behind the -ac and linus kernels 
so it would be hard to test things like the new VM's.  Usermode would not be 
suitable for driver development either.  Again, thoughts on this mode of 
development?

Which brings me to the final question.  Is there any reason to choose 
architecture A over architecture B for any reason besides arch-specific 
development in the kernel or for device drivers?

AKK

-- 
Adam K. Keys
<adam.keys@HOTARD.engr.smu.edu> (Remove the HOTARD to email me)

Re: Development Setups

[Michael Rothwell]

On Fri, 2001-10-05 at 00:20, Adam Keys wrote:
> As a budding kernel hacker looking to cut my teeth, I've become curious about 
> what types of setups people hack the kernel with.  I am very interested in 
> descriptions of the computers you hack the kernel with and their use patterns.

Here's what each developer was equipped with at my former place of
employment, back when they had money and all:

Two x86 machines, one workstation and one "blow up box".

Console on serial port, minicom logging to a file.

/usr/src on the "blow up box" nfs-mounted from workstation; 100MBit
ethernet

Used kdb sometimes.

Re: Development Setups

[David Woodhouse]

adam.keys@engr.smu.edu said:
> I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/
> compiling on,  and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I
> would not risk losing data  if I oops or somesuch. 

With journalling filesystems you needn't worry _too_ much about losing 
data; depending of course on what you're hacking on. Having two separate 
boxen for development and testing is mostly valuable because you can keep 
working when you break it - it doesn't take your entire desktop environment 
down with it.


adam.keys@engr.smu.edu said:
>  Which brings me to the final question.  Is there any reason to choose
>  architecture A over architecture B for any reason besides
> arch-specific  development in the kernel or for device drivers?

If you're developing device drivers and have the choice, pick something 
esoteric to enforce good behaviour. Something which does out-of-order 
stores, has non-cache-coherent DMA, is big-endian and preferably 64-bit. I 
think both mips64 and sparc64 boards can meet all those criteria - if not, 
get as close as you can. 

--
dwmw2

journaling and devel [was Re: Development Setups]

[Pavel Machek]

Hi!

> > I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/
> > compiling on,  and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I
> > would not risk losing data  if I oops or somesuch. 
> 
> With journalling filesystems you needn't worry _too_ much about losing 
> data; depending of course on what you're hacking on. Having two separate 
> boxen for development and testing is mostly valuable because you can keep 
> working when you break it - it doesn't take your entire desktop environment 
> down with it.

I disagree.. With journal filesystem, when something is silently corrupting
your disk, you'll never know. With ext2, you sometimes sync & reset to make
sure your disks are still healthy. I would not recommend journaling on 
experimental boxes.
								Pavel
-- 
Philips Velo 1: 1"x4"x8", 300gram, 60, 12MB, 40bogomips, linux, mutt,
details at http://atrey.karlin.mff.cuni.cz/~pavel/velo/index.html.

Re: journaling and devel [was Re: Development Setups]

[Steve Lord]

> 
> I disagree.. With journal filesystem, when something is silently corrupting
> your disk, you'll never know. With ext2, you sometimes sync & reset to make
> sure your disks are still healthy. I would not recommend journaling on 
> experimental boxes.
> 								Pavel

On the otherhand I have found the main problem with using XFS on development
platforms is that you do not test the kernel shutdown code very much.
It is much faster to just reset the box than to do a shutdown, and it
does not make a difference when you bring it back up.

Steve

Re: Development Setups

[Riley Williams]

Hi Adam.

> As a budding kernel hacker looking to cut my teeth, I've become
> curious about what types of setups people hack the kernel with.
> I am very interested in descriptions of the computers you hack
> the kernel with and their use patterns.

Here's the collection I use...

 1. 386sx/16 with 8M of RAM running RedHat 6.0 as none of the later
    RedHat's will install on it - they all need >8M of RAM to install.
    This serves as my network print server.

 2. 386sx/25 with 387sx/25 with 8M of RAM running RedHat 6.1 as none
    of the later RedHat's will install on it, as stated above. It is
    noticable that the presence of a 387 maths copro allowed 6.1 to
    install where it wouldn't otherwise.

 3. 486sx/25 with 12M of RAM running RedHat 6.2 as none of the
    RedHat 7.x's will install, all needing >12M of RAM to install.

 4. 486dx2/66 with 16M of RAM running RedHat 6.2 and serving as my
    network dial-up server. It's stable as it currently stands, so
    is unlikely to be upgraded anytime soon.

 5. 486dx4/120 with 32M of RAM running RedHat 6.2 as RedHat 7.x runs
    out of hard disk space - it only has a 350M hard drive in it at
    the moment.

 6. P75 with 32M of RAM running Win95 so I can check that the Linux
    systems I set up for customers will correctly interact with any
    Win9x systems they may have, and also used to run the software
    I need to run that's only available for Win9x.

 7. P166 with 96M of RAM awaiting a new hard drive (the existing one
    self-destructed a week or so ago). Once the new hard drive is
    obtained, I'll be installing RedHat 7.1 on it.

Depending on what else I'm doing at the time, I can use any of the above
to "hack" the kernel, including the Win95 machine if everything else is
busy. I generally use (3) to compile the results on.

> I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing and
> compiling on, and then older machine(s) for testing. This way I
> would not risk losing data if I oops or somesuch.

> Alternately, is there a common practice of using lilo to create
> development and testing kernel command lines?

I have a lilo entry that reads as follows:

	image=/usr/src/linux/arch/i386/boot/bzImage
		label=tryme
		alias=develop

I also have a script set up for only root to run that reads...

	#!/bin/bash
	lilo && lilo -D develop && reboot

...which I run to try the kernel out.

> Is this a useful thing to do or is it too much of brain drain to
> switch between hacking and testing mindsets?

That depends on how you set your system up.

> Instead of having separate machines, there is the possibility of
> using the Usermode port. As I understand it this lags behind the -ac
> and linus kernels so it would be hard to test things like the new
> VM's. Usermode would not be suitable for driver development either.
> Again, thoughts on this mode of development?

I've never tried it, and have no plans to do so.

> Which brings me to the final question. Is there any reason to
> choose architecture A over architecture B for any reason besides
> arch-specific development in the kernel or for device drivers?

Not that I'm aware of.

Best wishes from Riley.

Re: Development Setups

[Alan Cox]

> I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/compiling on, 
> and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I would not risk losing data 

That is how I work. One box editing/building and one testing. It also allows
you to stare at dumps, oopses and things as well as the source at the same
time.

> Instead of having separate machines,  there is the possibility of using the 
> Usermode port.  As I understand it this lags behind the -ac and linus kernels 
> so it would be hard to test things like the new VM's.  Usermode would not be 

Usermode Linux is merged with the -ac tree - it is great if you want to do
non device driver hardware work.

Re: Development Setups

[Jeff Dike]

adam.keys@engr.smu.edu said:
> Instead of having separate machines,  there is the possibility of
> using the  Usermode port.  As I understand it this lags behind the -ac
> and linus kernels  so it would be hard to test things like the new
> VM's.

Not really.  The latest UML is sometimes pretty far ahead of what's in the
-ac tree, but it usually works fine.  So, if you're interested in the generic
kernel, and not UML itself, that shouldn't be a problem.  And currently, 
the -ac tree is pretty close to my CVS.

Also, the latest patches usually go pretty cleanly into the -linus pre kernels,
so getting those running in UML shouldn't be hard.

>   Usermode would not be  suitable for driver development either.

This is just because no one has written the code to do it.  It is perfectly
possible to do hardware device driver development in UML.  Various USB people
have started trying to do USB driver development under UML, for example.

				Jeff

Re: Development Setups

[Andrew Ebling]

> I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/compiling on, 
> and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I would not risk losing data 
> if I oops or somesuch.  Alternately, is there a common practice of using lilo 
> to create development and testing kernel command lines?  Is this a useful 
> thing to do or is it too much of brain drain to switch between hacking and 
> testing mindsets?

I like the two box strategy and have written a detailed description of
how to set it up (right down to the wiring diagram for the serial
cables):

http://www.kernelhacking.org/docs/2boxdebugging.txt

This will become part of the forthcoming kernelhacking-HOWTO...

Feedback on this document from anyone would be very much appreciated
from anyone :)

happy hacking,

Andy

Re: Development Setups

[Adrian Cox]

Andrew Ebling wrote:


> Feedback on this document from anyone would be very much appreciated
> from anyone :)


The only thing I'd add is some pointers to setting up the target box 
with NFS root. In my setup for driver development both my x86 and ppc 
target boxes are diskless. The x86 boots using etherboot on a floppy, 
and the ppc has network booting in the rom.  I just compile a new kernel 
on the development box, copy it into my /tftpboot directory, and hit the 
reset button on the target. No mess, no fuss, no fsck.

-- 
Adrian Cox   http://www.humboldt.co.uk/

Re: Development Setups

[Tim Moore]

> I was thinking of starting with a modern machine for developing/compiling on,
> and then older machine(s) for testing.  This way I would not risk losing data

I use the 'fast/slow' model for app server development.  The fastest
machine is used to build kernels for the slower test machine(s)
regardless of architecture or latest/greatest hardware.  Most results
can be scaled once you understand interactions.  NFS w no_root_squash is
useful provided a secure LAN.

rgds,
tim.
--