Digital Wasabi

Parsing for fun and profit I remember creating parsers to be a bit harder. I tried using Antlr when doing the JavaFX DLR project and failed at it miserably. It felt messy. I couldnt get a feel for how to structure the document, etc. I was drawn to the Irony parser framework because declaring the grammar in C# somehow felt (at the time) cleaner and it seemed to allow for more expressive statements and character logic. I am not sure if it was my previous experience with parsing and Antlr (or Irony), or how clean and expressive the GOLD parser framework is, but I've been able to create a working parser in just a few days of coding. And by working, I mean it parses and understands valid LLVM IR straight from the project's documentation:  I actually implemented a a lot more operations and keywords needed to parse the example. It was just easier that way. I am going to now start building an AST. I've decided to be a bit aggressive because I think the AST will drive ...

Just wanted to give a quick update. On the ZFS front i have really made inroads. I now have to decide whether to create a stand alone snappy kernel module (which could assist folks outside of my little tinkerings) or roll snappy into zfsonlinux, so i can do some benches, and see if its a viable alternative to the compression included in zfs. I am leaning toward kernel module, but I've found a project called snappy-c that is a completely C port of snappy. This will make option #1 super easy. On the tinkering front, Xamarin has ported the java layer of android to C# . I have already gotten my hands on the source. Planning to put it on a phone or tablet soon.

I didnt expect to have the time, but I really became interested in answering the question of how easy working with the linux port of ZFS would be. I am here to say that I got everything compiled and installed last night. I am now trying to track down an shared library file that doesnt seem to be found. It exists, but my guess would be that the zfs tool is looking for it in /usr/lib instead of /usr/local/lib. The specific error is: /home/techsaint/files/zfs-project$ zpool zpool: error while loading shared libraries: libnvpair.so.1: cannot open shared object file: No such file or directory

My ZFS/Snappy project was put on hold, because of technical issues and lack of understanding (and documentation) of how to integrate a library into an Illumos build. I may have found a compromise. The zfs on linux project has become a bit more mature. I may switch up and use linux to create a snappy proof of concept.   I understand linux build structure much more than open solaris build structure, and the things i dont understand are fairly well documented. Because zfsonlinux is on github , I'll most likely be using Github and forking the project.

Woo!. Seems everything compiles perfectly. I had to copy the snappy libraries into the closed binary section of the build. Also, i had to build a 64bit and 32bit version of snappy (a bit difficult). I ran into a libtool bug (yes, another road block) when trying to compile the 64bit version of snappy. Right now, I use iscsi with virtualbox. So its difficult to import that into a different VM product (most desktop VM products dont support iSCSI booting).. I think i will copy over my illumos-gate directory to a now OpenIndiana installation, using a virtualHD, instead of iscsi. Then i should be able to import it into VMware or VirtualPC...and avoid the virtualbox bug I am experiencing with the latest illumos build. https://bitbucket.org/techsaint/zfssnappy

I am currently trying to add the snappy compression into ZFS for fun. You can check out my code here:  https://bitbucket.org/techsaint/zfssnappy I've been working on this for a few months (started around august). I've had massive roadblocks every step of the way. The first was the oracle purchase of Sun. Because of the purchase, the Sun Compiler tool patches (which were needed for an illumos build) were removed from the public. It took a month or so for the community to post instructions on using GCC instead of the Sun Compiler. After that, there was slight bug in the illumos build configuration that didnt allow for working builds if your new build version was older than the whatever version of illumos you were on. See  https://www.illumos.org/issues/1118 Now this new bug, is a virtualbox bug, which just appeared out of no where. Here is the ticket:  https://www.virtualbox.org/ticket/9651 . Since I rebased with the latest illumos code (as per build instructions) I ...