Truth, Computing and Fail

I tried this thing last semester too but I wasn’t too serious about it. I had decided to go for gentoo for obvious benefits that’d support the frequent rebuilding of the kernel. Somewhere down the line gentoo got caught in a cyclic dependency error and I forgot about the whole thing. But I am digressing.

Anyway, I built gentoo from scratch and got things working. This step by step guide is quite good to get started. Note that this is about adding system calls to the kernel, not implementing them.

The guide is a bit old though, and just one thing needs to be changed. Step #16 mentions the use of the _syscallN macro. Don’t use it. From the man page of _syscall

NAME

_syscall – invoking a system call without library support (OBSOLETE)

NOTES

Starting around kernel 2.6.18, the _syscall macros were removed from header files supplied to user space. Use syscall(2) instead.

The _syscall() macros do not produce a prototype. You may have to create one, especially for C++ users.

Instead use a function wrapper like this:

long mycall(int i, int * result)

{

	return syscall(__NR_mycall, i, result);

}

i and result are the arguments I used for my syscall and quite obviously it would vary according to whatever you decide to write.

There are quite a few other guides too on this topic but they are generally old and not updated. So in any case you do need to poke around quite a bit to get things working.

Some really good reading material:

• Kernel command using Linux system calls ( uses the _syscallN macro in examples )
• Playing with the cr0 register. This is a bit advanced for my current knowledge level and I’m in the process of fully understanding how the register works. Try at your own risk.

Read to gain an insight into Ramanathan Subramaniam’s sunshine-up-the-ass[1], everything’s-fine-but-not-us view of Manipal.

This freedom to live life on their own terms, to decide for themselves what they want and it makes them understand how difficult it is to take decision sometimes

Regular readers of this blog must be by now familiar with the knuckleheaded rules of the authorities that I have been putting up often.

There have been a lot of additions, of a whole new level of douchiness, to those rules and I was waiting for a few more (!) to aggregate and dissect them one by one. But this neo-Gandhian claptrap has forced me to cut short my period of silence. So let there be light.

“Freedom to live life on their own terms, to decide for themselves what they want”

Hell yeah! Click on the image and read #4. What does it say? “Police have been requested to detain students roaming around the campus after 12:00AM midnight”. Right. Detain. The cream of India’s criminal society have all converged upon Manipal and the fatass police force will save the day. Say hurray for them! There are so many things wrong with the whole point and I don’t even know where to start. For starters, as I have already said in my earlier posts, there is no fucking law in the country that would stop you from venturing out in the night unless some curfew has been imposed on the area due to riots. But trust the assholes here to turn around every law on its head with their money power and clout, running a clear cut case of parallel government with self-styled rules that are very much at heads-on with the laws of the land. The audaciousness of the University to order the detention of students found outside the campus is mind blowing. It has been said that power blinds people and this is a very good example of it. Is the police force a plaything of the University, or are they hired? Have the students entered into some kind of Devil’s deal with the University that allows the latter to intervene in their personal affairs (and maybe own their souls too)? Also, what the fuck is it with the midnight deadline? Right now, Manipal is at its worst kind of weather and add to that craptastically designed hostels that allow the least amount of airflow within them. If we were at our home town, it’d be very natural for us to take a stroll around and enjoy the night breeze. But here, it usually involves at least 10 different kind of profanities to get the guards to open the gates. So much for the freedom to live life on my own terms.

Now they decide what you should eat, where you should live and what not. What next? University branded underwear?

Also, the incident that the linked TMJ article reports only serves to highlight the ineffectiveness of the gazillion number of guards they have placed everywhere who don’t serve the purpose of representing a vibrant campus even closely. If there is one angle of the whole issue that goes unreported even by TMJ, the self-proclaimed champion of truth, it is the harassment of the timid, unassuming students by the security guards and of the girls by the ‘matrons’ in their hostels. I have myself seen at least five instances of students being harassed by the guards. There were this group of ten students who were just hanging out and chatting around 11 in the night. Suddenly a group of guards come out of nowhere and start shouting at them like they were driving away a pack of street dogs. Regarding the girls, if they come late to the hostels, they are forced to spend the whole night in a ‘common room’, which is just a TV room with wooden benches uncomfortable for even sitting properly. What kind of fuckery is this? No one signed up for this shit. I’m not even a little bit amused at this turn of events. It has been the latest trend among the ones lower down the administration order to needlessly harass the students, just for kicks. I can’t comprehend by what stretch of logic these uneducated, illiterate ( or at best semi-literate ) akkas are allowed to push around girls a thousand times more intelligent and qualified than them. If it were not for the non-existent recruitment standards of the hostels, they would have been sweeping floors and slaving it all around the town only for a few hundred rupees. But then fools tend to forget where they stand.

I hope you remember Pravin Madhukar Pawar, the SP, who uttered these memorable words:

Student nuisance in Manipal won’t be tolerated

Looks like he finally ran into the nuisance causers.

Coming back to the world of pink bubblegum virtues extolled by Mr Ramanathan, he goes on to condemn the students who did nothing but “stood there in dismay, in anger, in frustration, in fear, in amusement, or with carelessness and an attitude of ‘why should I care?’”. Nice, just that it makes a childish assumption that you can put the world in black and white, like those who felt bad and those who were nonchalant about the whole thing. I’ll let you into a secret. The world has “shades of gray”, like the new age character actors like to call it. There were also people in the crowd who sympathized with the devil on the bike. The reason for such a shocking behavior shouldn’t be too hard to understand. With each stupid and draconian rule imposed on day-to-day activities of the students, they have grown increasingly frustrated at the administration but unable to vent it. So when someone decides to take on the same administration heads on, people will silently cheer for him. Therein lies the most dangerous aspect of this reckless display of power by the authorities. It has only served to turn the students against them and with a hostility rarely seen out of battlefields. The situation is just the right kind for the dudes who would just want to cause havoc and anarchy, who are plain evil. They have no kind of ideological commitment, but they will utilize this situation to the fullest to further the damage. I am ready to bet my life on it that if such an incident had happened a couple of years ago, there wouldn’t be any bystanders but a group of students handing him over to the police. There are only 2 ways out of this:

(a) The authorities understand that the situation has gone out of control and behave in a rational manner while framing rules

(b) The current set of people in charge of things just need to step down

But seriously, I’m sure neither of these will happen. Not with eagles breathing down your neck. The fuglification of the campus with barricades, walls and all that shit will continue unabated in the name of security and spearheaded by a bunch of lunatic individuals who are here to implement their personal vendetta, likes and dislikes instead of giving a bit of breathing space to logic and rationale.

I rest my case.

[1] This phrase is an invention by Ted Dziuba and full credits to him