Running traditional virtual machines like the free as in beer VMWare can be taxing if you have an older machine. Running multiple virtual machines with VMWare for development sucks up all resources on my Pentium D system which has 512M RAM. To try out the latest hardware assisted virtualization, I went and bought myself an AMD Athlon based system that features SVM. The Linux kernel, from version 2.6.20 onwards features KVM, that lets you run unmodified operating systems at native speeds! If your processor supports hardware assisted virtualization, that is.

Now running multiple systems is a pain, especially if you have limited desk space. I can’t have 2 sets of keyboard, mouse and monitor. A really nice thing to have now is a KVM (keyboard, video and mouse)switch. This lets you share those indispensable I/O devices among multiple systems. The ones that I have seen earlier provide a switching panel and can handle multiple systems. But I was running only 2 systems. So I got myself a simpler one from Chennai’s own Ritchie street. This neatly designed KVM switch can switch between PCs when the scroll lock is pressed twice in quick succession. This is an incredible tool! I really don’t miss manually switching cables when I needed to install different distributions. For other things, there is SSH.

Many of my friends, when they come visiting plugin their MP3 players into my PC to warm the batteries up. Computers have become so common that the MP3 player manufacturers have wired up the charging mechanism via the USB ports. You may sometimes, however feel the need for a traditional adaptor. During these times, you can make use of Swaroop and co’s ION. This is a pretty useful device providing the much needed USB port, sans the computer. The other end of this device is a standard power cable  that you can shove into a wall socket. Your iPod/MP3 player couldn’t be happier. I think Swaroop and co must put this on eBay, it will give them good coverage. For Rs. 399, this is a neat device.

I wrote a mail to the OpenVZ maintainers, but these things take time to decide. Or there may be no release at all, since SWSoft, the company that sponsors OpenVZ development, actually sells an improved version with tools called Virtuozzo. If they make the code available under the LGPL, that would mean that commercial , non-open source software is free to link with it and utilize its services.

The approach I used in EasyVZ is simple. The OpenVZ utilities are very scripting friendly with a very regular text output format. So, I used Python to read the output, parse it and used it. This technique I call camera print technique. It comes from this:

You get legal, original DVDs from the market, or you can also get poor quality, shoddy DVDs that are theatre -> handycam -> DVD copies. Well, you can hear the audience laughing when there is a good joke or you can see someone go out to take a piss or a smoke when the director gets uncreative. These illegal copies are said to be shattering the life of many producers, especially with movies riding on crores of rupees.

Executing an external binary and parsing its output is an easy way to avoid GPL-LGPL issues, but there is a cost performance-wise and also resource-wise. The camera print technique has helped me though, and it seems to come in handy once more with Libvirt. I have no clue if the maintainers will be interested in horrible code like this, but only time will tell.

It seems that there are actually 4 cameras in there and that one of them captures a larger view compared to the other three. The view from the larger camera is then shrunk to produce a normal picture, resulting in the stair shape.

See here for more details.

OpenVZ is a operating system level virtualization solution that lets users run many instances of virtual servers(each can be a different distro) on the same hardware. Whats more, the overhead is almost negligible.

EasyVZ is currently alpha quality software and definitely contains bugs and incomplete features and is released in the spirit of “releasing early”.

The project page is here.

Read more here.

Intel some time ago announced its Dual core procesors based on its Core architecture. You might have noted that the Core 2 Duo processors are clocked at a slower rate than the Pentium 4s available in the market. Have no doubt, the Core 2 Duo processors with slower clock speeds with beat the “faster” Pentium 4s hands down. This is the way forward for CPUs, rather than continuing to fight the Gigahertz wars. Intel has now also come out with four cores with its Core 2 Quad offering. AMD is not far behind. There are limits to overcome in the basic architecture, however. After the Megahertz war is over, it is not straight forward to start a “number of cores” war. As the number of cores on a processor increase, there will be high bus contention. The system bus for these CPUs is still a common resource for all the cores.

The increase in the number of cores does not increase performance of the system in a linear fashion, there are other issues related to caches, for example. Since RAM is a common resource, before reading from a location, a CPU must make sure that more recent contents for that location are not sitting in the cache of some other CPU. So all these CPUs are constantly chatting with one another about such issues, making linear performance increase impossible. These issues become worse as the number of CPUs increase in an SMP system. There are other architectures like NUMA, that make things less worse, but these are just workarounds, like many things in engineering. Take caches for example.

There are now many interesting probleme to solve! Seymour Cray once noted Anyone can build a fast CPU. The trick is to build a fast system.

Intel was also the vendor who lead computer users into the 32 bit era, by releasing the 80386 CPU, of course other vendors followed suite. When users went shopping for computers, in the old days, they probably asked their computer savvy friends which CPU based system to buy and they answer they got was a ‘386′ or a ‘486′. While the Intel line of CPUs were simply called “Intel 386″ or “Intel 486″, the AMD clones were calles “AM386″ or “AM486″. Life was easy for the salesman, who would sell the user a “386″ or a “486″ depending from where he got better profits, while the users didn’t know (or care) from which vendor the CPU came from.

I first thought that the reason why Intel didn’t sue AMD for using a similar trademark was because I read somewhere that numbers can’t be trademarked. But a little googling reveals that this is not the case. I guess they can be. The issue was really not about trademarks at all. Intel actually shared CPU designs with AMD for the 386 and the 486 processors. Early AMD CPUs actually run Intel microcode. This was beacause AMD was the second source in many tenders for the government and large corporations. So, Intel “needed” AMD. There were several lawsuits between Intel and AMD where Intel tried to negate the design sharing agreements. AMD finally realized that getting future processor designs from Intel would become more and more difficult and thus designed its first architecture in-house, the K5.

Intel wanted to lead the world into 64-bit computing, with its Itanium processor in 2001, but failed. It is believed the primary reason for this failure is its incompatibility with the x86 processors that the whole world ran on. 64-bit processors have been around in quantity since the early 1990s, especially the Silicon Graphics MIPS based ones, but thats another story. AMD, in the meantime, came out with the AMD64 architecture that added 64 bit extentions to the existing x86 architecture. These processors became an instant hit due to backward compatibility. Intel’s 64 bit architecture is referred to as IA64. In a strange twist of events, Intel secretly worked on to include AMD’s extentions into its processors and released them to the world calling it EMT64.

I think this is the first event that changes the path from the MHz wars to wars based on CPU features. So, it seems the wars wil continue anyway. I remember the Chinese saying, “May you live in interesting times”.

To be continued.