Some of my code might be running on your Linux computer system

This is a bit of a blast from the past but in the 90s, I liked to hack on the Linux kernel code and keep an eye on the development versions as they were released. Due to being a college student, my systems were rather cobbled together and not necessarily the fastest, so I was always looking for ways to make them run faster.

Based on a Slashdot article that mentioned an open-source code search engine, I decided to check to see how many of my 'code hacks' were still out there.

A few patches dealt with the Linux kernel TGA framebuffer, specifically on the DEC Alpha Multia, which at one point was my primary workstation. It was 64-bit before all the cool kids were doing it! I think I still have one in storage that runs the Digital Alpha version of Windows NT 4.0, and an early beta of Windows 2000 before the Alpha support was canned. Hopefully the hard drive still spins up but I suspect the power regulator on the motherboard is probably shot, which happened quite a bit on those systems.

The one patch I am most proud of made it officially into the TTY console layer of the Linux kernel in the 1.3 or 2.0 kernel era. I mention it from time to time to people, and due to how much Microsoft and other non-Linux 'stuff' I do these days, they tend to react as if I am making it up.

Thankfully, this is the proof that it really happened.

At one point I had a very temperamental Sound Blaster CD-ROM which had a custom interface card that plugged into the ISA port of my system. Due to some of the "interesting" code changes I made to the Sound Blaster CD driver, I was able to make the kernel driver about half the size and also make my CD-ROM spin up correctly 100% of the time. The standard kernel driver used to fall over when it received some of the error codes my hardware was throwing at it. Almost all of those original Sound Blaster CD-ROM drives had a defect that would eventually make them fail completely and no longer read any CD inserted into the caddy.

So, basically, I'm taking a little trip down code memory lane with this search engine.