Open jobs for finishing GNU libc: --------------------------------- Status: December 1998 If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>. ~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~ [ 1] Port to new platforms or test current version on formerly supported platforms. **** See http://www.gnu.org/software/libc/porting.html for more details. [ 2] Test compliance with standards. If you have access to recent standards (IEEE, ISO, ANSI, X/Open, ...) and/or test suites you could do some checks as the goal is to be compliant with all standards if they do not contradict each other. [ 3] The IMHO opinion most important task is to write a more complete test suite. We cannot get too many people working on this. It is not difficult to write a test, find a definition of the function which I normally can provide, if necessary, and start writing tests to test for compliance. Beside this, take a look at the sources and write tests which in total test as many paths of execution as possible. [ 4] Write translations for the GNU libc message for the so far unsupported languages. GNU libc is fully internationalized and users can immediately benefit from this. Take a look at the matrix in ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/gnu/ABOUT-NLS for the current status (of course better use a mirror of ftp.gnu.org). [ 6] Write `long double' versions of the math functions. This should be done in collaboration with the NetBSD and FreeBSD people. The libm is in fact fdlibm (not the same as in Linux libc 5). **** Partly done. But we need someone with numerical experiences for the rest. [ 7] Several math functions have to be written: - exp2 with long double arguments. Beside this most of the complex math functions which are new in ISO C99 should be improved. Writing some of them in assembler is useful to exploit the parallelism which often is available. [ 8] If you enjoy assembler programming (as I do --drepper :-) you might be interested in writing optimized versions for some functions. Especially the string handling functions can be optimized a lot. Take a look at Faster String Functions Henry Spencer, University of Toronto Usenix Winter '92, pp. 419--428 or just ask. Currently mostly i?86 and Alpha optimized versions exist. Please ask before working on this to avoid duplicate work. [10] Extend regex and/or rx to work with wide characters and complete implementation of character class and collation class handling. It is planned to do a complete rewrite. [11] Write access function for netmasks, bootparams, and automount databases for nss_files and nss_db module. The functions should be embedded in the nss scheme. This is not hard and not all services must be supported at once. [14] We need to write a library for on-the-fly transformation of streams of text. In fact, this would be a recode-library (you know, GNU recode). This is needed in several places in the GNU libc and I already have rather concrete plans but so far no possibility to start this. *** The library is available, now it remains to be used in the streams. [15] Cleaning up the header files. Ideally, each header style should follow the "good examples". Each variable and function should have a short description of the function and its parameters. The prototypes should always contain variable names which can help to identify their meaning; better than int foo __P ((int, int, int, int)); Blargh! [16] The libio stream file functions should be extended in a way to use mmap to map the file and use it as the buffer to user sees. For read-only streams this should be rather easy and it avoids all read() calls. A more sophisticated solution would use mmap also for writing. The standards do not demand that the file on the disk is always in the correct form so it would be possible to enlarge it always according to the page size and install the correct length only for fclose() and fflush() calls. [18] Based on the sprof program we need tools to analyze the output. The result should be a link map which specifies in which order the .o files are placed in the shared object. This should help to improve code locality and result in a smaller foorprint (in code and data memory) since less pages are only used in small parts. [19] A user-level STREAMS implementation should be available if the kernel does not provide the support. [20] More conversion modules for iconv(3). Existing modules should be extended to do things like transliteration if this is wanted. For often used conversion a direct conversion function should be available. [21] The nscd program and the stubs in the libc should be changed so that each program uses only one socket connect. Take a look at http://www.cygnus.com/~drepper/nscd.html An alternative approach is to use an mmap()ed file. The idea is the following: - the nscd creates the hash tables and the information it stores in it in a mmap()ed region. This means no pointers must be used, only offsets. - each program using NSS functionality tries to open the file with the data. - by checking some timestamp (which the nscd renew frequently) the programs can test whether the file is still valid - if the file is valid look through the nscd and locate the appropriate hash table for the database and lookup the data. If it is included we are set. - if the data is not yet in the database we contact the nscd using the currently implemented methods. [22] It should be possible to have the information gconv-modules in a simple database which is faster to access. Using libdb is probably overkill and loading it would probably be slower than reading the plain text file. But a file format with a simple hash table and some data it points to should be fine. Probably it should be two tables, one for the aliases, one for the mappings. The code should start similar to this: if (stat ("gconv-modules", &stp) == 0 && stat ("gconv-modules.db", &std) == 0 && stp.st_mtime < std.st_mtime) { ... use the database ... { else { ... use the plain file if it exists, otherwise the db ... } [23] The `strptime' function needs to be completed. This includes among other things that it must get teached about timezones. The solution envisioned is to extract the timezones from the ADO timezone specifications. Special care must be given names which are used multiple times. Here the precedence should (probably) be according to the geograhical distance. E.g., the timezone EST should be treated as the `Eastern Australia Time' instead of the US `Eastern Standard Time' if the current TZ variable is set to, say, Australia/Canberra or if the current locale is en_AU. [25] Sun's nscd version implements a feature where the nscd keeps N entries for each database current. I.e., if an entries lifespan is over and it is one of the N entries to be kept the nscd updates the information instead of removing the entry. How to decide about which N entries to keep has to be examined. Factors should be number of uses (of course), influenced by aging. Just imagine a computer used by several people. The IDs of the current user should be preferred even if the last user spent more time. [26] Improve the AIO implementation so that threads do not immediately terminate if no more requests are available. Let them sleep for a while and wake them up on demand. If after a while no request arrived they really can die.