First entry in 9.5 months

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 02:00:00 CEST

It's been a long time since my last entry, about 9.5 months. So what has happened since then? Not much. I moved to a new apartment 6 months ago, still looks a little like I recently moved in but that is starting to change to the better.

I havn't been hacking very much on netfilter, or on anything lately, I implemented a small hackish mysql-backed dhcp-server in perl but that's about it. I've been on vacation for 3 weeks and I've rediscovered the joy of hacking. I've been working on cleaning up nf_conntrack a bit in preparation for using regular spinlocks instead of rwlocks, and then moving on to RCU. So far I've split nf_conntrack_core.c into a few smaller files since it was fairly large at 1700 lines, replaced the rwlock with spinlock, use RCU for l3/l4 protocol handlers and helpers. And various other cleanups and minor optimizations. The goal is to use RCU for the hashtable as well and only use a few atomic operations in the fast path, currently we have a truckload of atomic operations in there.