[img_assist|fid=55|thumb=1|alt=Daemon] I am experimenting with setting up a “jail” inside of FreeBSD (on my Ultra 60). jail is a utility available on FreeBSD that imprisions a process and *all* of its descendants. It can be used as a virtual machine that runs an entire instance of FreeBSD or it can be used to encapsulate a single executable.

I have been playing with it, and I must say it is very cool indeed. Here are some links that will greatly streamline the process of setting up *your* jail:

• Making your own jail rc script
• Jail threads at BSDForums
• jexec - allows you to connect to your jail once it has been started (vi your rc script, presumably)

Something the FreeBSD docs don’t tell you (not anywhere I can find anyway) is that you have to use a serial console to install FreeBSD on Sparc64….as Adam Sandler puts it, “…again, information I could have used yesterday!” In all fairness, 6.0 is supposed to provide native terminal support for Sparc64, so this is unnecessary for that version and on (hopefully).

I am working on my thesis for an MS in computer science, and my topic is finite automata. It is being done in Perl, and once I finish what I am doing I will be sure to release the details. I promise it is not Earth shattering. It seems like the more low level I get into CS the more I like it....anyway, on to the subject.

I discovered the joys of perl -d:DProf, and was able to drastically improve performance for RE->to_nfa by only changing state names if there was a clash and only sync’ing the epsilon symbol if they were different. This netted a 300% peformance gain when converting fifty 32-character regexes. Granted they were randomly generated and contained varying degrees of nested expressions, but it is still a great result!

Again - a hack that I am not sure works 100%. I used the following regular expression grammar to create an SLR table by hand.

Just a side by side comparison with 3.4, but still a good read. I'd personally like to see some reviews on the autovectorization and sms features, but who has the time ;). http://www.coyotegulch.com/reviews/gcc4/index.html

[img_assist|fid=63|thumb=1|alt=Programming]

While I am not particularly proud of this LL(1) hack, nor am I completely sure it works 100%, I still want to see how this blog handles code posts. This is available in my cvs repository under the module "regexll". I'll post a LR(1) parser after Thursday.

http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2005-May/014425.html

When will 5.4-RELEASE be released? Check out