Dave Jones - RedHat

Ugly Ducklings: Resurrecting unmaintained code

Paper (PDF) and Paper (DVI) and Paper (TeX) and Slides (MagicPoint).

Throughout the development of the 2.5 kernel, a number of drivers and pieces of infrastructure that had been left to stagnate finally got a long overdue cleanup. As successive areas got the cleanup treatment, patterns started to emerge:

• The splitting up of multiple instances
• Reorganising directory structures
• Simplification of abstraction layers
• Moving to new APIs to decrease lines of code

In this talk, David Jones will discuss some of the areas that have been cleaned up, and in what way that was achieved. By means of example, he will cover the i386 MTRR driver and the i386 setup code. He will spend the remainder of the talk focussing on the AGPGART driver, detailing how a few small cleanups have lead him to end up maintaining it.