Back in September, we had the GNU Tools Cauldron in the gorgeous city of Montréal (perhaps I should write a post specifically about it…). One of the sessions we had was the GDB BoF, where we discussed, among other things, how to improve our patch review system.

I have my own personal opinions about the current review system we use (mailing list-based, in a nutshell), and I haven’t felt very confident to express it during the discussion. Anyway, the outcome was that at least 3 global maintainers have used or are currently using the Gerrit Code Review system for other projects, are happy with it, and that we should give it a try. Then, when it was time to decide who wanted to configure and set things up for the community, I volunteered. Hey, I’m already running the Buildbot master for GDB, what is the problem to manage yet another service? Oh, well.

Back in 2016, when life was simpler, a Fedora GDB user reported a bug (or a feature request, depending on how you interpret it) saying that GDB’s gcore command did not respect the COREFILTER_ELF_HEADERS flag, which instructs it to dump memory pages containing ELF headers. As you may or may not remember, I have already written about the broader topic of revamping GDB’s internal corefile dump algorithm; it’s an interesting read and I recommend it if you don’t know how Linux (or GDB) decides which mappings to dump to a corefile.

Heya!

This past Saturday, April 27th, 2019, Samuel Vale, Alex Volkov and I organized the Toronto Bug Squashing Party here in the city. I was very happy with the outcome, especially the fact that we had more than 10 people attending, including a bunch of folks that came from Montréal!

The start

It was a cold day in Toronto, and we met at the Mozilla Toronto office at 9 in the morning. Right there at the door I met anarcat, who had just arrived from Montréal. Together with Alex, we waited for Will to arrive and open the door for us. Then, some more folks started showing up, and we waited until 10:30h to start the first presentation of the day.

Às vezes, é preciso combater. É preciso dizer que o outro está errado, que ele está falando besteira sobre um assunto que não conhece (e não quer conhecer). É preciso dizer o que é ético, o que é certo. É preciso discernir tudo o que é errado e anti-ético, imoral, e que faz mal. É preciso combater o ódio, muitas vezes com amor, outras tantas com força e integridade.

É preciso falar praquele ignorante que ele não sabe o que é Software Livre. É preciso dizer que o Software Livre é muito maior do que o GNU, muito maior do que uma pessoa ou do que suas declarações. É preciso dizer que o ignorante tornou-se troll. É preciso dizer que ele não sabe o que fala, e que deve calar-se. É preciso deixar que ele viva sua adolescência conturbada e por vezes medíocre, mas tomando cuidado para que isso não influencie outras pessoas ignorantes a tornarem-se trolls também. É preciso que esse troll saia do Twitter, saia do BR-[GNU/]Linux, saia dos fóruns movidos a coisas proprietárias; ou talvez seja preciso que ele fique lá, destilando seu ódio, veneno e ignorância para seus semelhantes.

After spending the last weeks struggling with this, I decided to write a blog post. First, what is “this” that you are talking about? The answer is: Linux kernel’s concept of memory mapping. I found it utterly confused, beyond my expectations, and so I believe that a blog post is the write way to (a) preserve and (b) share this knowledge. So, let’s do it!

First things first

First, I cannot begin this post without a few acknowledgements and “thank you’s”. The first goes to Oleg Nesterov (sorry, I could not find his website), a Linux kernel guru who really helped me a lot through the whole task. Another “thank you” goes to Jan Kratochvil, who also provided valuable feedback by commenting my GDB patch. Now, back to the point.

Deu saudade de escrever em português :-). E deu saudade, também, de fazer algum post mais “filosófico”.

Não sei dizer o porquê, mas às vezes tenho uma mania besta: gosto de ficar procurando “sarna pra me coçar”. Em outras palavras, eu fico procurando coisas que me deixam mal, mesmo sabendo que vou ficar mal depois de vê-las.

Não tenho explicação pra esse comportamento. É algo meio sabotador, meio sofredor, meio… Não sei. Às vezes, quando me vejo novamente nesse ciclo vicioso, consigo parar. No entanto, na maioria das vezes, eu entro num estado estranho: é como se eu estivesse me observando, estudando quais consequências aquele ato traz para mim. Fico me perguntando se sou a única pessoa desse mundo que faz isso…

A friend of mine, Blaise, once told me not to introduce myself as “… what you would call a radical…”. He had listened to me talking to a person who were questioning what a Free Software activist does. My friend’s rationale, to which I totally agree, is that you must let the other person decide whether she thinks you are a “radical” or not. In other words, if you say you are a “radical” from the beginning, it will probably induce the other person to a pre-judgement about you, which is not good for you and for her.

To what extent should Free Software respect its users?

The question, strange as it may sound, is not only valid but also becoming more and more important these days. If you think that the four freedoms are enough to guarantee that the Free Software will respect the user, you are probably being oversimplistic. The four freedoms are essential, but they are not sufficient. You need more. I need more. And this is why I think the Free Software movement should have been called the Respectful Software movement.

Yes, you are reading correctly: I decided to buy a freacking Chromebook. I really needed a lightweight notebook with me for my daily hackings while waiting for my subway station, and this one seemed to be the best option available when comparing models and prices. To be fair, and before you throw me rocks, I visited the LibreBoot X60’s website for some time, because I was strongly considering buying one (even considering its weight); however, they did not have it in stock, and I did not want to wait anymore, so…

It has been a while since I dream of being able to send encrypted e-mail to everyone in my contact list. It is still a distant future, but fortunately it is getting closer with campaigns like the Reset the Net. And while I already send encrypted messages to a couple of friends, it is always good to discover (and share!) some configuration tips to make your life easy :-).

I use Gnus as my e-mail (and news!) reader for quite a while, and I can say it is a very nice piece of software (kudos to Lars and all the devs!). For those who are not aware, Gnus runs inside Emacs, which is a very nice operating system (and text editor also).