Long time no see

It’s been a long time since I last updated this blog. Between my studies, the last two GSoCs I was a part of and my personal life I had little time to spend on this blog. Now this will change. With this post I will tell you a little about some of the things I am working on and some goals I have in mind.

I hope that by the end of this post my mind will be better organized and get more productive!

My work on Guix and Hurd

Two years ago I announced that I successfully ported GNU Guix to GNU Hurd. But that didn’t mean that everything was done. During GSoC 2016 I started working on creating a Hurd based GuixSD system. Unfortunately the time frame was not enough and it needed more work. But I have continued working on it and hopefully I will be able to deliver a working image soon. I also have help from a fellow hacker called Rene, and which I am really thankful.

I try to push all of my work to the upstream Guix repo, but sometimes my code doesn’t meet the standards. As a result the day to day hacking happens in a github repo.

I will write another post on how to use that repo to actually try Guix on Hurd yourself.

Things that work:

• Guix can cross-build or build natively most of the packages needed for a GNU system and others.

Things I need to finish:

• There is a library I wrote for the Hurd called libhurdutil which I need to clean and finally push to Hurd.
• Use the library above to finish implementing build isolation in the Guix daemon while on Hurd.
• Fix the packages that cannot be build but are needed for a GNU system.

My work on Guix (but not Hurd :P)

I am using Guix in my everyday life a lot! This mean I had to add a couple of packages, not related to Hurd, in the span of these last 4 years .

Currently I need to finish:

• The GNU Radio package.
• The Open MW package. (I have already packaged its dependencies)

My thesis on L4/Fiasco

The purpose of this thesis is to offer isolation between processes, where a process can be a simple app that read from a sensor to a fully fledged Linux system. And all this on top of a zynq board, called zedboard, which is an FPGA + arm CPU. The plan is to control which process access what hardware. While running on the same system. And did I mention Fiasco is a microkernel? It sounded cool to me!

While the thesis did have some setbacks, which I will talk in another post, it has advanced enough to think that I will be able to defend it sometime in September.

Currently I need to:

• Solve issues with accessing time controllers from inside the processes.
• Write the thesis text.

In a future post I will get into the inner working of my thesis. Until then if you are not aware of L4/Fiasco please visit here.

My smart home project

A year go I was given the opportunity to finish the unfinished building which is directly upstairs from the one I am now. Suddenly the idea came. Why not automate as much as I can!? Create a house which will learn its occupants. Design everything from scratch. And I started.

For the sake of not making the post longer than it is now, I will redirect you to my twitter feed and my conversations with David Thompson. In the near future I will add a post which I will get into the details of the house.

This blog

David has created a static site generator called haunt in scheme. Eventually I want to move this blog to haunt.

Grand Plan?

Is this my Grand Plan? Well I am mostly seeing this as a way to bring my thoughts in order and create a plan for the next six months. It doesn’t necessarily mean that I will manage to finish everything but it’s a good way to understand what I want to do, by actually trying to explain everything in my head and in my notes to other people.

By the end of this 6 months period, I will do my best to complete these goals!

Manolis out.