Open jobs for finishing GNU libc:
---------------------------------
-Status: December 1998
+Status: October 2004
If you have time and talent to take over any of the jobs below please
contact <bug-glibc@gnu.org>.
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.
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.
+ databases for nss_files, nss_nis, and nss_nisplus modules.
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));
+ int foo (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.
+*** The conformtest.pl tool helps cleaning the namespace. As far as
+ known the prototypes all contain parameter names. But maybe some
+ comments can be improved.
[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
+ code locality and result in a smaller footprint (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.
+*** This is a much lower priority job now that STREAMS are optional in
+ XPG.
+
[20] More conversion modules for iconv(3). Existing modules should be
extended to do things like transliteration if this is wanted.
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
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.
+[27] ...deleted...
projects / thirdparty / glibc.git / blobdiff