Good Evening everyone,
It has
been an hectic first week so my the blog for the first lab has been delay all
the way to today. So this blog will contain both Lab 1 material about
submissions to open source communities, as well as Lab 2 about my benchmarking
Lab.
Lab 1 - Open
Source Community Submission
For
this Submission I have to chosen to look at Mozilla Firefox Bug Fixing
Submission method and the proper way to submit patches to the Linux kernel.
This Lab submission is separate into those two part respectively.
Mozilla Firefox
To
submit a bug fix to Firefox anybody can just
needs to follow the instruction listed on their website at : http://codefirefox.com/.
For the purpose of this write up however I will summarize the content so it can
be contrasted to submission to the Linux Kernel.
To
submit a bug fix to Firefox, one can access their database of bug needed to be fixed simply by
signing up on the website with a free Bugzilla. A default account will allow
access to all the bugs Firefox is currently having as well as the ability to
post comments on the forums. It does not give access to the source code for
working on the bug.
In
order to be able to access those configuration file, one can just post on the
forum in the specific bug page the
interest in working on the bug. Then someone who has permission to access those
file will assign you as the current assignee to the bug therefore allowing you
access to the configuration. According to the website this process would not
take more than 24 hours. Once you have finish working on the bug you just upload
your code to the forum where it will be process by the main staff and other
contributors before been implemented into Firefox.
Now if
you are a regular on Firefox, you can take it to the next step to be able to
edit permissions and email: bmo-perms@mozilla.org. In the email that you would
send to them it should contain two bugs you have already worked on and fixes,
or three bugs you wish to be working on but could not because of the lack of
permissions. Once those permission are unlock, you should be able to assign
yourself and other as assignee for bug fixes.
Linux Kernel
To
submit patches for the Linux kernel, just like for Firefox, one can just follow
all the instruction listed on their website at: https://www.kernel.org/doc/Documentation/SubmittingPatches.
I will be however summarizing the process underneath for purpose of completing
this lab submission.
After
creating your patch in linux,(using the proper command) load it into a tar file
using the proper commands. Then you must write up a report with the list of
changes you have made. Be specific about it and make sure to include all
details such as will only work with certain driver, or previous patches, etc.
Then make sure to style check the changes, make sure the email or description
is plain text. Then send an email to one of the maintainers, you should receive
back and email. If not feel free to send the patch to the Linux kernel developer's
at : linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org. Then once the community has your patches in
hand it will get review by other developers. In any case of patches the final
decision on including your patch will be made by Linus Torvalds.
Lab 2 - Baseline
Builds and Benchmarking
For lab
2, our pod did not manage to properly finish the entire lab in time. We did
manage to start doing a baseline for PHP
compiling time on the x86 architecture machine.
What we did manage to do was download PHP, install all the library
necessary to compile PHP and then load up a test code for it on the x86
machine. We did not manage to get enough data to have a proper baseline, not
did we have the time to benchmark it to the ARM machine.
The commands
we have used are all listed below, and are the result of our pod collaboration:
# wget -O php-5.6.6.tar.bz2
http://ca1.php.net/get/php-5.6.5.tar.bz2/from/this/mirror
#./configure
\
--prefix=/usr/local/php
\
--enable-mbstring
\
--with-curl \
--with-openssl \
--with-xmlrpc \
--enable-soap \
--enable-zip \
--with-gd \
--with-jpeg-dir \
--with-png-dir \
--with-mysql \
--with-pgsql \
--enable-embedded-mysqli \
--enable-intl \
#make
#make install
Then the code we ran to attempt to baseline the compiling
time was the following:
#time php -r 'for($i = 0; $i < 1000; $i++){echo
"hello";}'
In which we tried to time the amount of time it takes for
php to run the command a 1000 times.
Hopefully
this can be a good point where our pod
can continue working from in the future to do baseline builds and benchmarking.
If
there is anything you feel can be improved, please feel free to comment and I
will try my best to fix it next time I blog. Hopefully this will be different
by the end of this course, I look forward to your responses.
