Doug's Home Page.

This is a random selection of stuff that interests me. Feel free to contact me by email about any of this stuff at dfr@nlsystems.com.

Qube Software Ltd.

For the last seven years I have been working for Qube Software as a software architect and company director. Qube is a small technology company specialising in foundation software for the entertainment industry. Our main work has gone into producing a framework for computer game development called the Q Engine. This engine is free for unsupported commercial use on Windows and Linux (a FreeBSD port could be made available given sufficient interest). A fully supported version of the Q Engine is available for XBox and PS2 development. You can find the latest released version and supporting documentation here.

Also, for the last couple of years, Qube has been working with Earthsim Ltd. to produce a selection of educational titles using our technology. You can see the first fruits of this project here.

The FreeBSD Project

I've been a FreeBSD user since around the 386bsd 0.1 timeframe and I've been a committer since about 1994. Things I have been involved with in the project include:

Core team member from 1999 to 2002
Member of the Technical Review Board, during its existence
NFS maintenance and optimisation
Designing and implementing the FreeBSD Kernel Linker.
Designing and implementing a generic device driver framework (which ended up being called "newbus" for no particularly good reason).
As a spinoff from the newbus work, a generic object-programming system for the FreeBSD kernel, called kobj.
Porting the FreeBSD kernel to the alpha architecture, including most of the legwork required to fix many 64bit portability issues.
Helping out with some of the heavy lifting in the early stages of the SMPng work, including implementing alpha SMP support
Porting the FreeBSD kernel to the ia64 architecture.
Putting together a framework for ia32 userland emulation within an ia64 or amd64 kernel
Writing drivers for various AGP chipsets as part of an effort to kick-start a port of the DRI hardware accelerated 3D graphics project
Countless fixes to various bugs in both kernel and userland, including toolchain maintenance when there was no-one else who could be tricked into doing it.
Ongoing work to add support for Thread Local Storage.

Valgrind

Recently, I have spent a lot of time working on a port of the excellent Valgrind debugging tool to the FreeBSD operating system. This is an ongoing project with changes happening on a fairly regular basis. You can use Subversion to track the current state of the port. A stable version of valgrind which was based on a snapshot of valgrind cvs dated 10th January 2004 is at svn://svn.rabson.org/repos/valgrind/branches/stable. This version has had extensive testing on both FreeBSD 4.x and FreeBSD current. A less stable working version which tracks the valgrind cvs more closely can be found at svn://svn.rabson.org/repos/valgrind/branches/current.

To build either the stable or the current versions of valgrind, you must have a recent version of perl installed. The simplest way to do this is to install the lang/perl5.8 port and if you are using FreeBSD 4.x, 'use.perl port'. To build the stable version of valgrind, download valgrind-stable-352.tar.gz, unpack it and run the configure script and build it with gmake. Alternatively, you can use subversion to check out the branches/stable tree, in which case you will need to have the devel/automake18 and devel/autoconf259 ports installed and you will need to run the autogen.sh script first to generate configure. For example:

  $ tar xvfz valgrind-stable-352.tar.gz
  $ cd valgrind-stable-352
  $ ./configure --quiet
  $ gmake
  $ gmake install

or alternatively:

  $ svn co svn://svn.rabson.org/repos/valgrind/branches/stable valgrind
  $ cd valgrind
  $ ./autogen.sh
  $ ./configure --quiet
  $ gmake
  $ gmake install