Status Update

Executive Summary
=================

The -rc4 build of 1.6 was ready for release with some last minute fixes for the beaglebone issues (thanks!). Its great to finally get that out there.

I've started merging changes into master. I've put various gcc changes forward that I've had a few moments to work on. There was also an issue I found in bitbake which gives about a 7% build speed improvement on our standard image test and I found some versions of git are rather slow at operations which should be fast.

I've not travelled to ELC/OEDAM due to being unwell and worn out :(

1.6 Release
===========

I believe this is ready for release. There are a variety of patches which did not make it in and we will queue those for a point release. The timing on the point release will depend on the kind of issues we find in 1.6.

Master
======

I've started merging patches in so this has opened for changes. Of note so far:

GCC - I did find a few moments to write most of the patches needed to rework our parts of our gcc recipes and continue to improve the toolchain which will be valuable as we more forward. The first part of these has merged. The second part is out there for review and there are some bugs there I need to fix before it merges (meta-ide-support in particular). There is a third set of patches I've not cleaned up and sent out yet which standardise the toolchain hashes.

Bitbake - The task scheduling algorithm has a couple of bugs in it which I found after noticing some strange behaviour with low numbers of threads. This was worth a 7% speedup of our benchmark image build test. Unfortunately it was too late to get that into 1.6 but it may make the next point release. I also found that git 1.8 is slow for some operations and we really want to use 1.9+ (worth around 1 minute on linux-yocto kernel build time). Chris has also found what looks like a nasty bug in the codeparser cache which is a good thing to find.

ELC/OEDAM
=========

I've not travelled to ELC/OEDAM as planned. I was already worn out with previous travel and a variety of other things, then I've come down with a bug which I held off over the weekend but has caught up with me now :(. The flights and so on don't agree with me at the best of times and I'd lost my voice before even leaving so I decided to rest instead. It wouldn't have been fair to potentially spread the bug around either.

Its the first trip I've ever cancelled and I'm sad not to be at OEDAM in particular but if I had travelled I doubt I would have been in any state to participate. Sorry if that causes difficulties for anyone.

I'm aiming to write a separate email about where I think we need to focus with the project going forward.

Given the situation, I'm going to try rest this week and take a bit of a break from things. This may slow down patch merging and so on.

Cheers,

Richard

B != S - I meant to add here that I merged the B != S patch for autotools which does have impact for other layers. I did work a while back to fix up oe-core and the layers the yocto autobuilder tests. We've held off this for a while and the hope was other layers would get tested and fixed up. I'm not sure that has happened, particularly in meta-oe as yet unfortunately. The benefits to B != S are significant in build accuracy and determinism and I did say I'd merge it after release so that has now happened.

PRINC - I have dropped the removal of PRINC for this cycle since there were concerns about that and its probably a little aggressive.

contains - I also have concerns about the contains() changes being a touch too aggressive and needing a little more soak time. I had assumed they just standardised references to the function, not removal of the functions themselves yet. I'm therefore holding off some of the bitbake side of those changes.

Cheers,

Richard

Could you add contains_any patch in meanwhile? I understand you want to keep it rest for some time now before dropping the code of oe.utils.contains.

Otavio Salvador                             O.S. Systems
http://www.ossystems.com.br        http://code.ossystems.com.br
Mobile: +55 (53) 9981-7854            Mobile: +1 (347) 903-9750