New Job!

Is it related to Android? No! To Java? No! To GNOME then? No, not directly. Did I spin up a company? It could have been possible, but no, it's neither that!

So what am I upto?

It is great pleasure to announce that I now work for IBM, India.

I signed the joining letter on the 12th of May, 2015. Thereafter, I have been busy setting up my work environment on my IBM provided Lenovo ThinkPad and acquainting to the new(not very) city of Bangalore. I stick to Ubuntu for my development Linux distribution there so that I don't waste time on the learning curve. I installed Ubuntu with a bunch of software needed for my official work.

I work in the Linux Technology Centre (IBM-LTC), a part of IBM India Systems and Development Labs and my primary focus would be with the RAS (Reliability, Availability and Serviceability) team on OPAL (OpenPower Abstraction Layer) and related projects.

My first assignment is to build and install the upstream kernel master and boot-test and configure that using a Virtual machine. Sounds exciting, huh? :D
So, I installed my first Ubuntu guest virtual machine on top of my host Ubuntu following these steps and am getting comfortable with using the Virtual Machine Manager. I also had to enable BIOS settings for native KVM acceleration (Virtualization Technology and VT-d feature) for the VM to run at a usable speed. Then I followed simple kernel build steps (which I reserve for some other blog-post) and after some updates to grub configuration file, I could explicitly boot into a freshly built upstream kernel 14.1.0-rc5+.

Though my development machine is an Intel x86 machine but most of my patches are going to be tested on Power 8 machines eg. for enabling some functionality on PPC machines or checking some software compatiblity for PPC architecture, so if you don't have access to those machines, you might have to believe what I have to say.

I will describe my kernel fiddles and contributions to other open source tools/utilities in the coming posts so stay tuned! I'll mostly post patches with the email id: chandni[AT_SPAMFREE]linux.vnet.ibm.com