Alex's Alliterative Adventures

11 Comments so far

1. Alexei Karpenko June 15th, 2008 1:34 am

   Hey Alex,

   Thank you for making those instructions! It makes compiling indeed much faster. Not sure Bill is going to like us using a debugger though 😛

   Here is a simple 452post script for your local computer:
   ——————
   #!/bin/bash

   REMOTEHOST=fe06-solaris.student.cs.uwaterloo.ca
   USERNAME=your_username_here

   # Read arguments
   TITLE=$1
   shift
   KERNEL=$1
   shift

   # Transfer with compression (seems faster)
   tar -cjf post.tar.bz2 $KERNEL $*
   scp post.tar.bz2 $USERNAME@$REMOTEHOST:cs452/post/

   # Post on remote server
   ssh $REMOTEHOST -l $USERNAME cd cs452/post \&\& tar -xjf post.tar.bz2 \&\& 452post $TITLE $KERNEL $*
   ——————

   Just make sure that you create a cs452/post/ folder on your UW account.

   Later,
   Alexei

2. Alex June 15th, 2008 2:45 pm

   We were just straight-up copying our files without compression, so I tried adding some tar magic to our special sauce. When posting 4 modules to the servers, we averaged around 2.7s without compression, and something like 3.1s with :O A cool experiment, though. I wonder if the balance will shift when we start uploading more modules?

3. Alexei Karpenko June 15th, 2008 3:14 pm

   Hmm, perhaps. Your connection speed is probably a factor too. With my connection (Rogers Hi-Speed, heh…), compressed is faster by about 3 seconds.

   It would be nice to combine scp and ssh into one single ssh call so that the connection isn’t established and reestablished twice. But my Linux Fu is not strong enough 🙁

4. Alex June 15th, 2008 3:22 pm

   That would definitely do it. I’m working from the labs, and I’m plugged in at something like 1GB/s 😛

   Yeah, my thoughts exactly. I’m really new to linux too. I wonder if it’s possible to have an always-open ssh session in the background… I also read something something about mount a remote directory as a drive that might speed up the scp. I guess that I have something to play with once we hand in this assignment 😉

   Are you using eclipse? It’s like living in the lap of luxury..

5. Alexei Karpenko June 15th, 2008 7:07 pm

   Yes, I have remote directory set up, it’s pretty nice to work with remote files. It might be faster to use that, so I should give it a try. A friend told me also that “rsync -e ssh” is faster than scp in his experience, so that might be also worth considering.

   As for IDE, I have been using GEdit but might try Anjuta soon. My computer is pretty slow with Eclipse, unfortunately…

6. Alex’s Alliterative Adventures » Copying files with ssh June 22nd, 2008 9:52 pm

   […] at 1Gbit in the labs, so bandwidth isn’t the bottleneck. I followed Alexei’s lead and compressed our files: tar -cjf files.tar.bz2 $FILES scp files.tar.bz2 $LOGIN@$SERVER ssh $LOGIN@$SERVER tar -xjf […]

7. Denver Gingerich June 25th, 2008 7:54 pm

   The reason you couldn’t compile everything with GCC 4 is likely that you need to update your Makefile to use new library paths. I described how to update these paths in a past uw.cs.cs452 newsgroup post:

   http://groups.google.com/group/uw.cs.cs452/browse_thread/thread/5dab31bbcd7df344/6fe6e79853215517

   Unfortunately, the course staff haven’t updated the cross-compilation page yet. If someone wishes get it updated, I suggest pestering the course staff every once in a while until it’s done.

   It would be nice if someone could confirm that this works with the latest GCC (currently 4.3.1). I would suggest using the latest versions of all the tools, but I suppose if you don’t want to deal with any unforeseen compile problems when you switch back to the school servers, then you’d want to use the versions they use. In practice, such compile problems almost never occur.

8. Alex June 26th, 2008 12:58 am

   Thanks for the tip, Denver. Consider the course staff to be officially pestered.

   Out of curiosity, what brings your advice to this doorstep?

9. Denver Gingerich June 26th, 2008 8:32 am

   I saw your post on uw.cs.cs452, read this blog post, and then remembered that I had run into this problem before and fixed it. I regularly read uw.cs.cs452 to see if there are any problems people are running into that I’ve seen before so I can help them out.

   With CS 452, a lot of time can be spent seeking out the information needed to do a particular thing (like implementing a PS/2 mouse driver, for example). Spending time finding these things does not seem useful, especially when it’s been found before and it’s not integral to the point of the course. So if I can make this information available (since I found it in the past, for example) then it will make the lives of future CS 452 students much less painful.

   By the way, you should add OpenID support to your blog. Among other things, this would allow you to let OpenID-authenticated users post without moderation.

10. Simon July 5th, 2008 10:25 pm

    I would rather run everything locally so that a computer without Internet connection (or extremely slow connection in my case) can still work. So I have created a script for mounting the floppy image, copying the modules and kernel, recreating grub’s menu.lst, and umounting the floppy. It uses sudo as I couldn’t figure out how to mount arbitary image file as users.

    ———————————————————
    #!/bin/bash
    sudo modprobe loop
    sudo mount -o loop otherfloppy.img /mnt/floppy
    EMUDIR=/mnt/floppy
    MENU=$EMUDIR/grub/menu.lst

    if [ -e $MENU ] ; then
    rm $MENU || exit 1
    fi

    if [ ! -e $MENU ] ; then
    touch $MENU
    fi

    TITLE=”$1″
    shift

    if [ “x$TITLE” = x ] ; then
    echo “Usage: $0 title kernel [modules]”
    exit 1
    fi

    gawk ‘BEGIN { inside = 0; } /^title ‘”$TITLE”‘$/ { inside = 1; next } /^title / { inside = 0; } { if (!inside) print; }’ $MENU.tmp
    mv $MENU.tmp $MENU

    KERNEL=”$1″
    shift
    if [ “x$KERNEL” = x ] ; then
    echo “Usage: $0 title kernel [modules]”
    exit 1
    fi

    if [ ! -e “$KERNEL” ] ; then
    echo “Kernel $KERNEL does not exist. Aborting”
    exit 1
    fi

    cp $KERNEL $EMUDIR
    KERNEL=`basename “$KERNEL”`

    if [ -e $MENU.prepend ] ; then rm $MENU.prepend ; fi
    echo “title $TITLE” >> $MENU.prepend
    echo “root (fd0)” >> $MENU.prepend
    echo “kernel /$KERNEL” >> $MENU.prepend

    MODULE=”$1″
    shift
    while [ “x$MODULE” != x ]; do
    if [ ! -e “$MODULE” ] ; then
    echo “Module $MODULE does not exist. Aborting”
    exit 1
    fi
    cp $MODULE $EMUDIR
    MODULE=`basename “$MODULE”`
    echo “module /$MODULE” >> $MENU.prepend
    MODULE=”$1″
    shift
    done

    cat $MENU >> $MENU.prepend
    mv $MENU.prepend $MENU
    sudo umount /mnt/floppy

    ——————————————————-
    I resized the file image as it is too small.

    $ resize2fs otherfloppy.img 2M

11. Alex July 5th, 2008 11:53 pm

    If you just use the script that posts to the emulator, don’t run the script that posts to the school machines, copy over the bios/floppy images/etc (once!), and run the 452mkemu script (once!) on your machine, I think that you shouldn’t need an internet connection to work.

    Also, if you’re playing around with bochs on your home machine, you can boost the IPS (instructions per second) in the 452mkemu script to make bochs a lot snappier

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