Structure and Interpretation of Computer Programmers

You can’t use a java.awt.Color in WebObjects, because to use AWT at all on OS X requires connection to the WindowServer.  And unless you’re mad, you probably aren’t running your WOA as root.  This means I can’t do things like, ooh, I don’t know, making a PDF table have a white border instead of a black one.

Strange things can happen when I get bored.  There’s a great little dashboard widget called WikityWidget, which lets you organise notes like a wiki.  Well, I thought, no point in only having my notes on one computer, why not scrape the wikits out of WW and put them online?

You may be interested in some source code.

tyr:/Library/Parallels root# ls -l
total 16
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 40 Sep 12 15:52 .dhcp.en2
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 0 Jul 4 17:10 .dhcpd_configuration
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 0 Jul 4 17:10 .parallels_common_options
-rw-rw-rw- 1 root wheel 100 Jul 4 22:44 .parallels_license_2.2


I can waste a lot of time if an interesting question gets posed. The most recent culprit was Chris Ridd in uk.comp.sys.mac, wondering aloud if threads ever got shuttled between CPUs on a Mac. Here we go…

It certainly looks like the conditions for doing this through the API can never be met on a real Mac running xnu. All you can do is assign a thread or a task to a processor set, but not a single processor. Unless that processor happens to be the only member of a processor set. Thing is, on xnu there is only one processor set, which encompasses all of the processors. So there’s no way to force your threads onto a particular processor in Mac OS X. The lack of multiple processor sets means that you couldn’t have a box with, for instance, both a G5 and a Xeon running a single kernel, which is kindof sad in a way. It won’t get missed, though.

It doesn’t even look like there’s an API to work out which CPU you’re currently on. What you can do is get the port for the default processor set (the only processor set), then by manually furtling with the structs you can iterate through the CPUs (or you can ask your own mach_host_port for an array of the CPU ports). For each CPU you can get the thread queue, which you could compare with your own thread to see if it’s the same. That’d be tedious, but would get the required information. Once there though, I don’t see any way for the thread to move between any queues except the idle and run queues on its ‘native’ processor; so I think the answer is that no thread ever migrates between CPUs. I may be wrong, and am happy to entertain any information to the contrary.

Unsurprisingly with no API to do what I want, little useful code came out of this exercise. I found out how many cpus the system has, but that’s it really.

Update 2006-09-10 16:25 GMT – I hate this not knowing, so I decided to play the Ask Amit card ;-).

I’ve been trying to reply to bbum’s post, firstly my comments were removed as spam, then he approved them by hand, now they’re gone again. So here they are again.

I wrote [in this blog] much about my experiences getting OPENSTEP/Parallels working. Networking’s fine but slow, graphics is good, mouse is a bit jumpy. I was talking at WWDC with people who say that Microsoft VPC no longer supports OPENSTEP/Mach. You definitely can’t boot native on a new Intel Mac, as there’s no SATA driver (and no way to use a boot floppy).

BTW, the floppy images are available over HTTP from Apple: OPENSTEP floppyimages

I spent a lot of today grokking Distributed Objects to write a FAQ entry on it; link above goes to the new entry. Of course, any comments on it or the rest of the FAQ are welcome…

Sorry, but I was finally pushed into turning magic word input on for comments on this blog. Anyone may still comment, but you need to decode a picture in order to do so.

OK, so I said there was a good reason to set up Þæs Ofereode apart from the bandwidth at SDF not being up to the task, and it’s time to come clean. Yesterday I handed in my notice to my current employers, and I’m off to Opera Telecom to become a QA/Test developer. It looks like I’ll be doing funky things with GNUstep so regular readers of iamleeg will not notice a move away from Objective-C and UNIX related ventings.

Of course this has been brewing for a few weeks, but I wanted to make sure my eyes were crossed and my teas dotted before letting anyone else know. Especially on the big scary intarwebs.

For reasons which will be made clear in an upcoming post (probably next week, I’m off to the ‘sunny’ Vaterland soon) I’m in the process of consolidating all of my website activities (except for bloggage) onto Þæs Ofereode. This also lets me do funky things like svn and mysql hosting which I’ll sort out over time. I have an email address there but currently am seeing inexplicable bounceage so I won’t publicise that yet. The comp.lang.objective-c alt.FAQ‘s new home is also there, because the bandwidth at SDF is too small. When Apple publicised ObjC 2 on their Leopard preview page, my SDF site fell of the intarwebs with people looking to see if I’d written about it. Announcements about the ObjC FAQ move will be made on the newsgroup in due course.

Hell, or “vi vi vi: the editor of the beast” as Matt succinctly put it.  Anyway, I just wrote a Makefile with multiple dependent targets, and it worked first time.  That just shouldn’t happen – especially when you only ever used Project Builder to avoid having to write Makefiles.  I didn’t even have to look at the O’Reilly/Cygnus book much.