state, and any other information that seems related to the bug you’re seeing. You should take notes not only on the bug but also on the fix. As you work with the engineers

from your vendor, you need to track the patches they give you, if any, version changes in the hardware or driver, various theories about what might be wrong and whether the theories pan out, and pretty much everything else that is related to fixing or working around the bug. At this point you will often be both the project manager of th e b u g fix , a s w e l l a s t h e r e m o te h a n d s fo r t h e ve n d o r ’s 1

PCI Utilities

The PCI Utilities package contains various utilities deal- ing with the PCI bus, as well as a library for portable access to PCI configuration registers. It includes lspci

for listing all PCI devices (very useful for debugging of both kernel and device drivers) and setpci for manual

configuration of PCI devices (http://atrey.karlin.mff. cuni.cz/~mj/pciutils.shtml).

engineers. While this may not be what you thought you

signed up for, it’s more often than not part of solving a

hardware problem.

I hope you’re lucky enough to have decent documentation and support from your vendor. If not, then I’ll see

you at the bar. I’m the guy sitting alone at the far end,

crying into a chip manual with an always-full gin and

tonic. My bartender knows me well.

KV K O D E V I C I O U S , kn o w n t o m er e m o r t a l s a s G e o rg e V . N e v i ll e - N e il , w o rks on networking and operating system c o d e fo r f u n a n d p r of it . H e a ls o t e a c h e s c o u r s e s o n v ar io u s s u b je c ts re la t e d to p r o g r am m in g . H is a re a s o f in te r e s t a r e c o d e sp e l u n k i n g , o p e r a ti n g sy s te m s, a n d r e w r it in g y o u r b a d c o d e (O K , m a y b e n o t t h a t la st o n e ) . H e e a r n e d h i s b a c h elor’s d e g r e e in c o m p u t e r s c i e n c e a t N o r t h ea s t e r n U n iv e r s i ty i n B o s to n , M a s s ac h u se tt s , a n d is a m e m b e r o f A C M , t h e U s e nix A s s o ci a ti o n , a n d I E E E. H e i s a n a v id b i c y c li s t a n d t ra v e l er w h o c u r ren t ly l i v e s i n N e w Y o rk C i t y .

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