Month: July 2006

Splashimage in the initramfs with genkernel on the Pegasos

With kernel 2.6.16 several things changed in PowerPC-land. The kernel-maintainers decided to merge the ppc32 and ppc64 architectures into powerpc. That gave us some headaches, because a lot of the Makefiles changed as well.

Since March I had problems to build a kernel with an included initramfs for the Pegasos (because an external initramfs could not be loaded). In the past I used the target make zImage.initrd, but this failed now with genkernel. Today I finally found some time to look into that problem again, as I need a proper genkernel for release-building. I though I had to touch Makefiles and rewrite a couple of the kernel-build system… But in the end I could fix this problem with a simple two-liner-patch in genkernel, as only two pathes needed to be changed.

I tested the patch in Bug 141153 with the Pegasos at home and added the 2006.0-splashimage into the initrd. Now I have a nice bootsplash during the rare reboots 🙂

The other result was a working test-CD for the upcoming 2006.1 release. Unfortunately I can’t test the Apple-part, as I don’t own a working Apple any more. So I have to rely on other devs or release-testers (we need more of them!). And testing with qemu isn’t possible. It dies shortly after the kernel has been loaded…

Friday: Hacking Contest

Tomorrow, the CIPHER2 contest takes place again. This is a Capture-the-Flag like Challenges in Informatics: Programming, Hosting and ExploRing, organised by the university RWTH Aachen.

Last year I visited the team in Aachen with the fellow devs dertobi123, pYrania and bonsaikitten. We got a nice introduction to the game and I thought, one day I will take part as well.

But things changed and since March I’m mentoring a group of students in the subject “Computer- and Networksecurity” at my university of applied sciences in Krefeld. I told them about CIPHER and they founded a group that will enter the contest. And I’m their