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.

ACPI root pointer from UEFI System Table.

As I found out after I posted my lat entry , the correct way to find the Root pointer for the ACPI tables is to get it from the EFI System table. Where does that get set? Here’s the general flow: again, we start at init/main.c. start_kernel.   However, the call is not in the ACPI code, but rather in setup_arch. The call chain goes

start-Kernel->setup_arch->efi_init->efi_get_fdt_params and that seems to pull it our of initial_boot_params. I can’t quite see where that is initialized. Yet. From context it looks like it is constructed out of the kernel command line parameters. Still learning….

Learning ACPI for ARM64 part 1: Finding the Root.

It started as a request from our tech lead: please help triage these patches. So I lookedat the set of patches and started with what looked like the simplest one:

Fix topology for Core scheduling.

It *just* reorders the code to call

store_cpu_topology(cpu);
before
notify_cpu_starting() .

Yeah…there is no such thing as a simple patch. These are my notes as I study and learn ACPI. My assumptions are here for all to see, and may well prove to be wrong.

Lets dig in.

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Using virt-install and cloud-init

I want to call out a stellar article that told me exactly what I needed to do in order to use virt-install and cloud-init to launch a cloud-image. The only thing I have to add is the caveat that the #cloud-config comment at the top of the user-data file is required. The system will ignore the file if it does not start with that comment. This is the easiest way I know to launch a brand new VM.

XPath for libvirt external snapshop path

The following xmllint XPath query will pull out the name of the backing file for a VM named fedora-server-36 and an external snapshot named fedora-36-post-install,

virsh snapshot-dumpxml fedora-server-36 fedora-server-36-post-install | xmllint --xpath "string(//domainsnapshot/disks/disk[@snapshot='external']/source/@file)" -

The string function extracts the attribute value.

This value can be used in the process of using or deleting the snapshot.

Copy in for-each loops in C++

I had a bug in my OpenGL program. Here was the original code:

  for (Orbitor o : orbitors){
    o.calculate_position();
  }

and here was the working version

  for (std::vector<Orbitor>::iterator it = orbitors.begin() ;
       it != orbitors.end();
       ++it)
    {
      it->calculate_position();
    }
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