Author Archives: Adam Young

About Adam Young

Once upon a time I was an Army Officer, but that was long ago. Now I work as a Software Engineer. I climb rocks, play saxophone, and spend way too much time in front of a computer.

Agile is not agile

Posted on by
4

Based on previous experiences, I would be hard pressed to join a team that has Scrum masters.

I expect that my previous experience was extreme, but not outside expectations for an organization that felt the need to officially embrace Agile(tm) and the concept of agile practitioners as part of the development process. It has been a bit over a year, and my frustration at the process has had a bit of time to settle, but I still feel my virtual hackles rise up when I think about the process.

Continue reading →

The Overtone Scale?

Posted on by
Reply

If you look at the overtone series, specifically from the 8th to the 16th, you’lll notice that they fit into an octave and almost, but not quite, make up a major scale.. I’d like to look a little closer at that difference.

If we start on a C, the notes of the series are (almost)

C D E F# G Ab Bb B C

I say almost because they are not actually these notes…these are merely the closest approximations to the notes if you are playing a well-tempered clavier or its descendants. If you are playing something a little more flexible, such as a fretless string instrument like the violin, you can adjust your playing and play exactly these pitches.

Continue reading →

Enabling ARM64 CPU Capabilities in the Linux Kernel

Posted on by
1

ARM64 design defines features long before there is a CPU that can implement those features. Since the ARM ecosystem is so varied, there are many different CPU designs out there with different capabilities. A general purpose linux Kernel build put out by a major distribution has to work across a wide array of chips by a large nuymber of vendors. Thus, there is an enumeration of the capabilities inside the Kernel and mechnism for describing how to probe each of these capabilities.

Continue reading →

Finding Linux Kernel Config options in menuconfig

Posted on by
Reply

We have reason to believe that we should not be setting CONFIG_EFI_DISABLE_RUNTIME=y In our Kernel configs. I want to perform a controlled expereient booting two Kernel builds, one with this option set and one with it disabled. Since I have the option set, building that Kernel is trivial.

 make olddefconfig
 make -j$(nproc)  rpm-pkg

Now, to turn that option off, I could just edit the .config file. However, it is possible that there are other config options linked to that one, and there is logic to modify them together. I want to see what happens if I use make menuconfig to change the option to confirm (or deny) that only that option gets changed. But where do I find this option in the menu?

Continue reading →