Wednesday, June 17, 2009

kmemcheck in mainline

First of all, I should say that on April 22, I went to Denmark to give a talk on kmemcheck. I was invited to DIKU (Datalogisk Institut på Københavns Universitet) by Julia Lawall, who held a workshop on Coccinelle (or, more generally, "finding bugs in operating system software"). It was really nice to be there, not (just) because I got a chance to talk about kmemcheck, but because I learned so much from all the other talks! Feel free to check out my slides.

I had asked my university (the University of Oslo) beforehand to sponsor the trip in exchange for a trip report, but I got no reply to my e-mail. I guess they don't see any value in collaboration with universities abroad.

And now, for the news: Yesterday, kmemcheck was merged in mainline Linux! It is quite an incredible feeling after having spent so much time to make it work properly... (Not to mention the rebase marathon that ensued after Linus initially rejected it)

I had also asked Redpill Linpro (a Norwegian/Swedish open source developer) beforehand to sponsor my work on kmemcheck for the summer, but they apparently weren't interested. At least I got a polite reply. (Instead, I got a stipend from Google for working on Jato for the summer, but more on that in a later post!)