• Cauldron 2013

Cauldron 2013 BoF minutes

• Major interest in bug reports/fixes among users present at the BoF
• Bug reports/triage
  • Need volunteers
  • Create sourceware bug reports for distribution bugs whenever necessary
  • Lot of backlog of old bugs that have since been abandoned
• Release process is getting on track
• Getting everyone synced on release
  • Roland: Come towards a process that is synced up with distribution releases/schedules
  • Involve distribution maintainers in the process
• Distribution branches upstream:
  • Revive release branches for distribution maintainers upstream
  • Extensively document divergence via bug reports, patch comments, etc.
• Performance microbenchmark
  • malloc
    • Need to come up with a good way to benchmark it
    • Reach out to Linaro about the malloc benchmark
    • Separate microbenchmarks from whole system benchmarks
    • Have whole system benchmarking as part of glibc?
  • Get vendor input on benchmarks and inputs
• Multiple libm function implementations
  • Multiple libraries?
  • Code size is a problem, but can be solved in multiple ways, including configuration options
• Testing
  • Virtual machines for network testing or other types of tests
  • Improve testing in general
  • cross-testing necessary but no one has come up to do it
• C Library Tunables
  • Reassess current constants to reflect current state of hardware/use cases
  • Collate current tuning parameters/state under a single framework
  • Start with a global context, but make the design flexible enough to allow for finer grained contexts
  • Administrative control on tunables
  • More care needs to be taken on addition of environment variables for tunables
• Hardware enablement with new API
  • API to enable hardware features not a good idea
  • Tunables knob for administrators
  • Hinting interface for developers