Date: Wed, 24 Feb 2010 14:02:41 +0100 From: VOICE News Service Subject: [VOICENWS] Drivers: eCS: News from the bugfixing frontline ++ From the VOICE OS/2-eCS News Service http://www.os2voice.org ++ From: warpcafeDESPAM at DESPAMyahoo.de Some people only have a vague picture about what is involved in finding and fixing errors in software, especially system-level stuff and drivers. There are even people who supposedly believe that "nothing happens at all" with Mensys and eComStation... Well, I came across an interesting defect ("bug") at the eCS bugtracker that could serve as the role model of complexity involved in finding and fixing bugs: With a breathtaking story and equally high efforts involved, Lars Erdmann, Steven Levine, Remy Dodin, Allan Holm, Roderick Klein, Joachim Benjamins and others (namely ecosoft.ru) over time have teamed up to nail-down and fix a glitch around MTRR and "erratic" VESA BIOS behaviour on certain adapters (which impacts, amongst others, the GRADD subsystem and by this also the Panorama driver). The short story: For those who happen to have a non-functional or extremely slow VESA/Panorama experience on multicore machines, let me quote the part I like best in the ticket when they talked about...: > "an increase in performance of ruffly -what? 400% ?" The long story (you will need to have registered with ecomstation to get access to the bug tracker): http://bugs.ecomstation.nl//view.php?id=2582 http://bugs.ecomstation.nl//view.php?id=2652 (related) Being a QA person by my profession, I really admire how the involved people managed this, especially given the fact that they're doing that in their sparetime and not to mention the technical skills required to sneak around memory region management and registers... two thumbs up for Lars, Remy and Steven! I only wish we will see more such success stories. While we're at it: This is not a closed membership club. The bugtracker is open to every user of eComStation. Get involved and help improve quality by submitting your findings at least. Links: * http://bugs.ecomstation.nl//view.php?id=2582 -- For a choice in the future of personal computing, Join VOICE - http://www.os2voice.org [Moderator's note: All posts are sent without guarantee to the accuracy of the content. We try to verify details and URLs but this is an entirely volunteer run list, so 100% fact checking and the quality/useability of products announced here is impossible. If you respond to this post please remove the DESPAM from the poster's email addresses. Please do not send requests for information about a specific post to the moderator unless it is an update or I sent it. To submit news to this list please use the submission form at http://www.os2voice.org/SubmitNews.html or send an email to "submit at os2voice.org" To unsubscribe yourself from this list, send the following message to majormajor at os2voice.org unsubscribe news end ]