FOSS.IN/2006: Impressions

FOSS.IN/2006 is over. This year the event was held in the J. N. Tata Auditorium complex of IISc, Bangalore. This meant that we had much better seating arrangements and acoustics compared to last year, though some of the halls were awfully musty and for some reason the airconditioner in every hall was set to too low a temperature for my comfort. The food was much better than what was there last year and there were enough pure water dispensers to quench everyone's thirst throughout the day every day.

The scale of the event however was much smaller this year compared to last year. It was held for just three days instead of four days as in last year and there were just five simultaneous talks through the day instead of six as in last year. While many of the American hackers chose to skip the event this year due to its unfortunate overlap with the Thanksgiving weekend, I don't know what would explain the much lower turnout of Indian delegates and exhibitors.

I didn't find that many interesting talks this year so it was a bit depressing for me. In addition, there were many a glaring error in a couple of talks that I attended. Among the talks that I did like were the ones by Christof Wittig and Russell Nelson on the first day, the one by Aaron Seigo on the second day and the one by Tim Pritlove on the third day.

In a talk on OpenAlchemy, I asked why anyone in India should buy an Amida Simputer when it has a bulky form factor and is more expensive than a Palm Tungsten E2 which at first blush seems to have many a desirable feature and looks far more polished. Another member of the audience asked where it stands now that the OLPC project is here. I wasn't happy with the answers provided for either of these questions.

FOSS.IN/2006 Registration and List of Talks

You can now register as a delegate for FOSS.IN/2006. The final list of talks for FOSS.IN/2006 has also been released.

RMS, GPLv3 and Bangalore

Richard Stallman will be talking about "Free Software: Current Status and Challenges" at 11 AM in the Faculty Hall in IISc Bangalore tomorrow (Saturday, 19^th August 2006). I came to know of this event just this afternoon and I understand that this is too short a notice, but I hope to meet some of the fellow Free Software enthusiasts in Bangalore.

On a related note, Bangalore will also be hosting the Fourth International Conference on GPLv3 on the 23^rd and 24^th August 2006, this time in IIM-B. Both Richard Stallman and Eben Moglen will be presenting in this event. Since this falls in the middle of a work week (Wednesday/Thursday), I will have to skip it.

FOSS.IN 2006

FOSS.IN/2006 will be held between November 24-26 at the J. N. Tata Auditorium in IISc Bangalore. This event used to be called "Linux Bangalore" and is justly touted as "India's Premier Annual Free and Open Source Software Event". It has been organised every year since 2001 by the Bangalore Linux Users' Group (BLUG). Atul Chitnis's diary entry has some more information.

I have personally attended only two of these events and I regret not having attended more of these. FOSS.IN/2005 was fairly good and mostly fun. I hope to be able to attend this year's event as well.

GCJ for MinGW

I have updated my article "Building GCJ for Windows" and the associated scripts to work with the current SVN mainline sources of GCC (to be released as GCC 4.2). They might also work with GCC 4.1 sources, but I have not checked it myself. The article also has some tips for building GCC natively on Windows using the MSYS toolkit, especially to make the built and installed GCC relocatable (see below).

A major portion of the effort went in to ensure that the resultant toolchain was actually relocatable (that is, the installation can be archived and then extracted elsewhere, possibly on a different machine, and everything can still be expected to be working). The proper locations of the Windows headers and runtime libraries and the flags to pass to the GCC configuration scripts were something that took a lot of trial and error (and a lot of help from Mark Mitchell and Danny Smith) to get right, since I was trying to do something less common (building cross and crossed-native compilers) for a platform that gets the attention of very few GCC hackers as such, if at all.

I had stopped working on GCJ for Windows quite a while back and the reason I had to update my article and scripts was that there seemed to be a lot of people trying to build GCJ for Windows themselves using the latest released or in-trunk sources (and my instructions and scripts) and they were running into all sorts of issues. Unfortunately, GCJ on Windows has become worse than it used to be which is understandable since there is no one who is actively working on it to improve it. It is also a shame since even though it is a closed platform with an ugly design it appears to have the most number of users enthusiastically willing to try out GCJ.

We must do something about this situation.

QEMU
For a fan of Linux trying to make GCJ for Windows work, a very useful property of GCC is that it can be built on Linux as a cross compiler or as a crossed-native compiler targetting Windows. For a person with a relatively old machine and limited free time to hack on GCJ, this is also important since the build on Linux is way faster and far more reliable than that on Windows itself using MSYS. Equally important is the ability to test out the binaries created in this process without having to reboot the machine into Windows or having access over the network to another machine running Windows. Wine doesn't quite help since I need an environment that is as faithful to the real thing as possible.

QEMU running Windows on Linux comes to my rescue here. When run with the -kernel-kqemu option using the QEMU Accelerator ("kqemu"), the guest OS runs at very close to native speeds without adversely affecting the performance of the host OS. It has a built-in TFTP server that allows you to easily transfer files from the host machine into the guest system (there are also other ways of achieving this using QEMU, but this is the simplest). It's almost magical and is immensely useful. It's no wonder that virtualisation is becoming so popular these days and every developer who has tried it out sings its praises. If you are an "enterprise software" developer, you should already know what I am talking about. If you haven't tried it out yet, you really should. Virtualisation offers you the freedom and the flexibility to play around that is very useful and quite addictive.

GCJ and ECJ

RMS has finallly agreed to using ECJ to generate bytecode for GCJ!

That sound you hear is the huge collective sigh of relief heaved by Free Java hackers everywhere.

GCJ: Quo Vadis?

Andi Vajda asked whether GCJ would cease to exist if Sun were to release the source code for Java and its tools under a really Free licence. I have also seen such questions asked on Slashdot, OSNews and other fora.

The response from Andrew Haley mirrors what I personally think of the situation - as long as there are hackers willing to maintain it, GCJ would continue to exist. Miguel de Icaza says that among the two types of hackers who usually work on Free Software in their spare time, GCJ and GNU Classpath only attract the Free Software idealogues and not those who want to get something free (gratis) working for them since Sun's JDK already works well for them and is free. Tom Tromey has a more philosophic take on the current situation - almost ascetic in fact. All this is enough to make a GCJ or GNU Classpath hacker reflect on the current state of Free Java, the utility of his contribution to it and the impact of a fairly Free release of Java source code from Sun. Despite being an extremely erratic contributor working on the fringes of Free Java, I cannot help doing the same.

It was about four years ago that I first flirted with GCJ. I wondered, for no particular reason as is usually the case with me, if it was possible to use GCJ to create native GUI applications with SWT in Java on Windows. I found out that the support was almost there and with a little effort and a lot of support from the GCJ hackers (especially Tom), I was able to add in that support and contribute it back to GCJ where it was accepted with minor modifications. That was my epiphany with Free Software. Until then I was more impressed by the fact that I could get so much decent-quality software for free than the liberty to make modifications to such software. But now I began to realise that having the source code available to you meant that you could change it yourself to fix its shortcomings and share your improvements with the other users. It also meant that the availability of the software did not depend on the solvency of the vendor or its willingness to maintain it. There were many other factors in favour of Free Software that became apparent to me over time. Suffice it to say that I finally understood what that twitchy, smelly and passionate preacher of Free Software was talking about all the time.

In time, my original itch died out (like so many of my digressions in life) but I continued to work on GCJ. I quickly moved from Windows to Linux (since that was the only platform that I enjoyed working on) and began fixing front-end bugs more out of a desire to help folks than to fix anything that was affecting any of my personal or professional work. This played a part in the fact that my track record with GCJ has been absolutely abyssmal (except perhaps in the area of contributing the most noise to the GCJ mailing lists). My pathetic time-management skills and a propensity to be carried away by even the slightest distraction have also played a big role. Since I worked on GCJ in my free time at home and I did not want to compromise too much on my personal life (spending time with my family, watching movies, reading books, meeting friends, getting enough sleep, etc.), I rarely found the time to debug and test anything except the most trivial of bugs. Finally, my tendency to "wait and watch" (first for GCJX and now for ECJ) has not helped matters much either.

There are some inherent problems with GCC and GCJ too. The GCJ front-end seems to have been written in a hurry in order to get as many things working as fast as possible with not much thought given to overall maintainability. The people who originally wrote it have moved on to other things in life leaving others with little idea of how it all works. Subsequent hackers (including me) have always made incremental changes to fix immediate issues rather than perform any big refactoring of the code, with the natural result that the code has become even more unwieldy now than before. To fully bootstrap GCC, especially with checking enabled, and then to run its testsuite takes an awful amount of time, especially on slightly older hardware (like my otherwise perfectly capable P3-based system). This is a huge barrier for most prospective hackers. (I reserve my rant about the disastrous effects of bundling several language front-ends and their ever-bloating runtime libraries into a single compiler system for another day.) Until recently, the ubiquitous tree data structure was used in funky ways for almost everything in GCC. There is precious little documentation for a programme of this complexity and some parts of this documentation is out-of-date. The best way to understand stuff in GCC is to read through the source code, to watch the operation of the relevant parts in a debugger and to ask questions on the mailing lists when you do not understand something even after doing all this.

All these are problems that can be overcome one way or the other. The biggest problem with GCJ however is the sheer paucity of hackers willing to work on it to improve it compared to the number of people willing to use it and reporting problems with it. This situation is particularly severe for Windows. Were it not for Red Hat's sponsorship of some critical GCJ hackers (and the heroic efforts of Tom in particular), GCJ would have been in a very bad shape by now. This situation really makes me realise how true Miguel's observations are with respect to hackers of Free Software and Free Java.

A Free Java from Sun would not obviate the need for GCJ though. I personally feel that ahead-of-time compilation to native code providing more opportunities for aggressive optimisations (platform-agnostic as well as platform-specific) and a more straightforward integration with C/C++ via CNI are enough to show the utility of GCJ orthogonal to the status of the freedom provided by Sun's JDK.

This post has already become the longest I have ever posted, so I will reserve my rant about how Java the language and its bloated "standard" runtime is not even worth spending so much time and effort on in the first place, for another day.

www.hackgnu.org To Become Available Soon

Ramakrishnan is giving up his domain www.hackgnu.org. Any Free Software hacker who wants to take it over should contact Ramakrishnan before it lands in the hands of domain squatters.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

FOSS.in 2005

FOSS.in 2005 has finally ended. You can find daily reports and impressions on Planet FOSS.in.

Personally for me, it was a mixed event. I could finally meet some of the people whose work I have admired immensely over the years and I also attended a couple of really illuminating sessions. On the other hand, I didn't get to meet as many people as I had hoped to meet and some of the sessions were bad.


Alan Cox was the star of the event as far as I could tell. He was always surrounded by admirers or people just curious to see how he looks. He always had the Red Hat red hat on and talked very nicely to one and all. Like RMS, he seems to have a bit too much of facial hair and has the same habit of frequently twitching as well. I also met Andrew Cowie (java-gnome), Johnathan Corbet (LWN.net), Sirtaj Singh Kang (KDE) and Harald Welte (iptables/netfilter). By the way, I had imagined Harald to be an old person for some reason all this while so I was rather surprised to find a rather boyish looking young man with a lot of enthusiasm and a cool haircut.


I really enjoyed some of the talks, especially on topics that I knew nothing about. Jaya Kumar's talk on how to put together an embedded Linux system, right from selecting the hardware to customising Linux and burning it into the device, was awesome. The guy really knows his stuff and talks with an infectious enthusiasm on a lot of topics. His other talk on GPL and non-GPL kernel modules was also very nice.


Harald's talk on how he figured out what made up his Motorola A780 mobile phone (that runs Linux), hacking his way to getting telnet access to the phone and finally building and uploading updated kernel and applications was also awesome. He followed it up with a live demonstration. The results of his efforts are at OpenEZX.org. By the way, he uses an encrypted filesystem on his laptop to store everything.


There was a talk on hacking the GCC ".md" machine-description files for a quick-and-dirty solution to a code-generation problem and another on using GCJ with SWIG to interface Ruby with Java. However, I felt that these talks were a bit hurried and would have left most of the audience utterly clueless. By the way, the speaker for the former talk, Amber Ved, had recently fractured his left arm and had it in a sling. It was quite evident that it was excruciatingly painful for him but he persisted and managed to finish his talk. All I can say is, "Wow!". However, I still think GCC is severely under-appreciated and I wish I had put together a talk on GCJ or at least GCC. There's so much that has been happening with GCC that people deserve to know.


Another highlight of the event for me was the Google Quiz or "GQ". This was a set of four logic puzzles handed out to whoever they could lay their hands on and if you completed all four, you had a shot at winning an iPod nano. I really enjoyed solving these puzzles and they kept me busy for quite a bit of time.


Unfortunately for me, the schedule of the talks was such that sometimes I had to make a difficult choice of selecting a single talk among three to four very interesting sounding talks and sometimes I wasn't interested in attending a single talk in a given time slot. "You can't please all the people all the time" and all that. But no one can complain that there wasn't enough stuff going on - this surely must have been the biggest FOSS event ever in this part of the world. I am already eagerly looking forward to attending the next year's event. A big THANKS to Atul Chitnis and his gang of volunteers for pulling this off!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

FOSS.in 2005 Sessions

The detailed schedule of sessions for FOSS.in 2005 is available now (check out the names of the halls!). The good thing is that there are so many speakers and sessions to choose from. The bad thing is that many of the sessions one wants to attend either clash horribly with one another or overlap partially in incompatible ways. For example, on the very first day at 3:15PM, I have to choose between "Google and Open Source" by Zaheda Bhorat, "GCC Backend and Machine Description file" by Amber Ved, "equivalence configuring" by Andrew Cowie and "Introduction to cross-platform programming techniques" by Jaimon Jose!

Delegates from outside Bangalore might want to check out the annual book sale by the great Strand Book Stall while they are here in Bangalore. The venue for the sale is the Chinnaswamy cricket statium and is quite close to the venue for FOSS.in 2005. Veteran bibliophiles in Bangalore would readily tell you how friendly a store Strand is and how you can get some really good deals (up to 80% off) on books during their annual sale. Unfortunately for them, both Landmark and Crossword have now opened big stores in Bangalore. These stores do not usually give you as good a price on books as Strand, but are closer to the watering holes of many young people and have much more space where you can actually sit down and peruse a book at your leisure. I personally get most of my non-technical books from Landmark now simply because it happens to be much closer to my house and my place of work.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

FOSS.in 2005

Andrew Cowie has bullied me into attending FOSS.in 2005 after all. He made me realise what a shame it would be to miss this once-a-year opportunity to meet like-minded Free Software hackers from all over the place when it is happening right here in Bangalore. Of course it also helps to have supportive bosses to grant you leave from work for the period. So here's looking forward to meeting kindred souls. Thanks Andrew!


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

FOSS.in 2005

There are so many talks I would like to attend in FOSS.in 2005, but it happens to fall bang in the middle of a work week, that too at a time when I cannot afford to take too many days off work. Uggghhh!


(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Harmony: Quo Vadis?

The announcement of the Harmony project which aims to create a Free reimplementation of J2SE 5 under the umbrella of the Apache Software Foundation (ASF) seems weird to a lot of people (including yours truly). The initial FAQ does not help much either.

My personal opinion is that if you need Free (as in liberty) Java you have either Kaffe or GCJ depending on whether you prefer the traditional Java execution model or ahead-of-time compilation, respectively, not to mention many other VMs. Both depend on GNU Classpath to provide an implementation of the humongous and unwieldy "core" Java runtime class libraries. Without any elaboration, the "All of these efforts provide a diversity of solutions, which is healthy, but barriers exist which prevent these efforts from reaching a greater potential" from the announcement seems hollow and a serious case of the NIH syndrome.


Lastly, Java isn't even that great a language or has a great runtime that so many talented hackers should be wasting their time on it. Isn't there anyone who can come up with a good general purpose programming language with a good and minimal standard runtime environment and a Free language and runtime specification? I am talking of an imperative language with the ability to easily do OO-programming but where OO is not sickeningly mandated.

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Miscellaneous

RMS has a blog too!

Congratulations to Tom for getting GCJX to generate code!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Making Room for Linux

Without ntfsresize to help us out, we could not have made room for a Linux installation on an unfortunate PC that had a complete Windows 2000 infestation on its entire hard disc. All hail Free software!

(Originally posted on Advogato.)

Small World

Niraj Kumar, who contributed the support for FreeBSD's UFS2 filesystems to the 2.6 series Linux kernel is also from Bangalore!

Not only that - he works for Oracle India as well and in fact sits in the same building as I do!

I am yet to meet him though. :-/

(Originally posted on Advogato.)