Thushan Fernando Uncut

A new book titled The Race for a New Game Machine: Creating the Chips Inside the XBox 360 and the Playstation 3 was released on the 1st of Jannuary this year that looks into the development of the Microsoft Xbox 360 and the Sony Playstation 3 which, as it turned out in the end, were both developed by the IBM Corporation.

The authors of the book, David Shippy (who was the man behind the brains of the Cell) and his co-worker, Mickie Phipps goes into the depths of nerdisms to give an insight into the development of The Cell processor. From the Wall Street Journal review:

When the companies entered into their partnership in 2001, Sony, Toshiba and IBM committed themselves to spending $400 million over five years to design the Cell, not counting the millions of dollars it would take to build two production facilities for making the chip itself. IBM provided the bulk of the manpower, with the design team headquartered at its Austin, Texas, offices. Sony and Toshiba sent teams of engineers to Austin to live and work with their partners in an effort to have the Cell ready for the Playstation 3’s target launch, Christmas 2005.

But a funny thing happened along the way: A new “partner” entered the picture. In late 2002, Microsoft approached IBM about making the chip for Microsoft’s rival game console, the (as yet unnamed) Xbox 360. In 2003, IBM’s Adam Bennett showed Microsoft specs for the still-in-development Cell core. Microsoft was interested and contracted with IBM for their own chip, to be built around the core that IBM was still building with Sony.

All three of the original partners had agreed that IBM would eventually sell the Cell to other clients. But it does not seem to have occurred to Sony that IBM would sell key parts of the Cell before it was complete and to Sony’s primary videogame-console competitor. The result was that Sony’s R&D money was spent creating a component for Microsoft to use against it.

And here’s the real kicker.

Mr. Shippy and Ms. Phipps detail the resulting absurdity: IBM employees hiding their work from Sony and Toshiba engineers in the cubicles next to them; the Xbox chip being tested a few floors above the Cell design teams. Mr. Shippy says that he felt “contaminated” as he sat down with the Microsoft engineers, helping them to sketch out their architectural requirements with lessons learned from his earlier work on Playstation.

The deal only got worse for Sony. Both designs were delivered on time to IBM’s manufacturing division, but there was a problem with the first chip run. Microsoft had had the foresight to order backup manufacturing capacity from a third party. Sony did not and had to wait another six weeks to get their first chips. So Microsoft actually got the chip that Sony helped design before Sony did. In the end, Microsoft’s Xbox 360 hit its target launch in November 2005, becoming its own success. Because of various delays, the Playstation 3 was pushed back a full year.

The book (which arrived on Friday!) goes into all the juicy bits that lead up to the delivery of both processors, well worth the $14USD its listed for on Amazon. Whilst I havent finished the entire book yet, thus far its full of twists and corporate musings and tricks with an interesting look at the teams and people that made these two products possible in the end. You’ll be hooked from the first page - I guarantee it.

Developer, Gaming, Operating Systems, PS3, Xbox, hardware, software cell, console, David Shippy, gamer, games, hardware, ibm, microsoft, phipps, playstation, processor, sony, toshiba, video, xbox

Linus Torvalds just released Linux Kernel 2.6.28 today as an Christmas present to all the good (and not evil) l33tle-big boys and gals around the globe. This brings a whole host of new cool bits and bobs thats sure to get people excited (Ext4 being one and the GEM Memory Manager) read all about it in the Linux Kernel Newbies guide.

Some addtional juicy reading incase your stuck with the inlaws for some ‘family’ time:

• Ext4
  • Linux Kernel Newbies guide to Ext4
  • Wikipedia
  • Phoronix Real World Benchmarks of Ext4
• Btrfs - Butter FS
  • Btrfs Information
  • Btrfs Architecture
  • Extensive and exhaustive examination of Btrfs Performance
• Indepth breakdown of 2.6.28

Enjoy!

Developer, Kernel / Internals, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, hardware 2.6.28, btrfs, christmas, ext3, ext4, gem, gpu, Kernel, linus, linux, penguin, santa, satan, tux

Wishing everyone a very Merry Christmas and a Happy, Safe & Prosperous New Year.

Hope you were all good boys and gals and the quite old n hairy, slightly overweight but cheery bloke got you something you wanted. Even with all the naughties I’ve done this year (lets not elaborate on those), he still managed to visit my place and leave an I-Sobot under the tree. Unfortunately with the relatives and various visitors around the house I havent had a chance to open it up, when I do I’ll post some pictures and information. In the meantime, checkout this video about what i-Sobot can do.

Its My Life, hardware christmas, greetings, isobot, naughty, new year, nice, santa, snow, wishes, xmas

It only feels like last month Sun released VirtualBox 2.0 and they’ve just released 2.1 which brings a plethora of additional goodies… from the changelog:

• Support for hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V) on Mac OS X hosts
• Support for 64-bit guests on 32-bit host operating systems (experimental; see user manual, chapter 1.6, 64-bit guests, page 16)
• Added support for Intel Nehalem virtualization enhancements (EPT and VPID; see user manual, chapter 1.2, Software vs. hardware virtualization (VT-x and AMD-V), page 10))
• Experimental 3D acceleration via OpenGL (see user manual, chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), page 66)
• Experimental LsiLogic and BusLogic SCSI controllers (see user manual, chapter 5.1, Hard disk controllers: IDE, SATA (AHCI), SCSI, page 70)
• Full VMDK/VHD support including snapshots (see user manual, chapter 5.2, Disk image files (VDI, VMDK, VHD), page 72)
• New NAT engine with significantly better performance, reliability and ICMP echo (ping) support (bugs #1046, #2438, #2223, #1247)
• New Host Interface Networking implementations for Windows and Linux hosts with easier setup (replaces TUN/TAP on Linux and manual bridging on Windows)

Some key things to note here, those “cool” people that run OS X can now get hardware virtualisation. Even if you have a 32bit host operating system your able to run 64bit hosts so long as you enable hardware acceleration on the CPU (AMD-V or Intel-VT) as VirtualBox’s Hypervisor requires this to work. A couple of other major additions - tested personally, include the enhanced virtualisation on the new Nahalem processors (Extended Page Table & Virtual Processor Identifier - see below) and the starting block for OpenGL (and later DirectX) Acceleration in XP and Vista. Testing this on OpenGL gave some decent performance though its still got a bit of work to do.

The move to include 3D acceleration is an interesting one, considering VMWare recently acquired Tungsten Graphics - who is the company behind Mesa, TTM memory manager and Gallium3D.  Interesting times ahead - as always

What’s an Extendable Page Table & that VPID thing???

Virtualisation in the Intel world comes in two flavours, the Intel VT-x and Intel VT-i Architectures. The VT-x is for IA-32 processors, whilst the VT-i is for Itanium processors.

Intel took a slice of the Virtualisation pie offered by AMD’s Pacifier architecture in implementing a method of translating ordinary IA-32 page tables from the guest-physical addresses to the host-physical addresses used to access memory. This way, guest’s can handle their own page tables directly and page-faults associated with them directly and minimize the (sizable) overhead associated with translating. This is known as Extended Page Tables (EPT).

Virtual Processor Identifiers (VPIDs) on the other hand allows a hypervisor (or a VMM) to assign a non-zero VPID to each virtual processor with the initial processor (VPID = 0) assigned to the hypervisor itself. This way, the CPU can use the VPIDs to tag translations in the Translation Lookaside Buffer (TLB) which removes the performance penalties associated with flushing TLBs on VM Entry and exit.

Both these two bits of technology (along with NMI-window exiting)  come on the Nahelem processor’s Virtualisation enhancments. If your interested in a more indepth explanation see the article Solving Virtualisation Challenges with VT-X and VT-I from the Intel Technology Journal.

Other Changes in 2.1

• VMM: significant performance improvements for VT-x (real mode execution)
• VMM: support for hardware breakpoints (VT-x and AMD-V only; bug #477)
• VMM: VGA performance improvements for VT-x and AMD-V
• VMM: Solaris and OpenSolaris guest performance improvements for AMD-V (Barcelona family CPUs only)
• VMM: fixed guru meditation while running the Dr. Web virus scanner (software virtualization only; bug #1439)
• VMM: deactivate VT-x and AMD-V when the host machine goes into suspend mode; reactivate when the host machine resumes (Windows, Mac OS X & Linux hosts; bug #1660)
• VMM: fixed guest hangs when restoring VT-x or AMD-V saved states/snapshots
• VMM: fixed guru meditation when executing a one byte debug instruction (VT-x only; bug #2617)
• VMM: fixed guru meditation for PAE guests on non-PAE hosts (VT-x)
• VMM: disallow mixing of software and hardware virtualization execution in general (bug #2404)
• VMM: fixed black screen when booting OS/2 1.x (AMD-V only)
• GUI: pause running VMs when the host machine goes into suspend mode (Windows & Mac OS X hosts)
• GUI: resume previously paused VMs when the host machine resumes after suspend (Windows & Mac OS X hosts)
• GUI: save the state of running or paused VMs when the host machine’s battery reaches critical level (Windows hosts)
• GUI: properly restore the position of the selector window when running on the compiz window manager
• GUI: properly restore the VM in seamless mode (2.0 regression)
• GUI: warn user about non optimal memory settings
• GUI: structure operating system list according to family and version for improved usability
• GUI: predefined settings for QNX guests
• IDE: improved ATAPI passthrough support
• Networking: added support for up to 8 Ethernet adapters per VM
• Networking: fixed issue where a VM could lose connectivity after a reboot
• iSCSI: allow snapshot/diff creation using local VDI file
• iSCSI: improved interoperability with iSCSI targets
• Graphics: fixed handling of a guest video memory which is not a power of two (bug #2724)
• VBoxManage: fixed bug which prevented setting up the serial port for direct device access.
• VBoxManage: added support for VMDK and VHD image creation
• VBoxManage: added support for image conversion (VDI/VMDK/VHD/RAW)
• Solaris hosts: added IPv6 support between host and guest when using host interface networking
• Mac OS X hosts: added ACPI host power status reporting
• API: redesigned storage model with better generalization
• API: allow attaching a hard disk to more than one VM at a time
• API: added methods to return network configuration information of the host system
• Shared Folders: performance and stability fixes for Windows guests (Microsoft Office Applications)

Performance & Updates

Overall, on the two different machines that I’ve tried the new 2.1 release on, they’ve both “felt” snappier (QX6850 and a Core i7 965E - architecture summary) but unlike the 1.6 release - which was somewhat flakey for me, 2.x releases of VirtualBox are solid.

Dont take my word for it, download and try it out.

Gets me a VirtualBox 2.1

Grab your copy and try it out.

• VirtualBox 2.1.0 for Windows hosts x86 | AMD64

• VirtualBox 2.1.0 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 2.1.0 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 2.1.0 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86 | AMD64

• VirtualBox 2.1.0 Software Developer Kit (SDK) All platforms

• VirtualBox 2.1.0 User Manual (updated 2008-12-17)

Give it a shot, heck try OpenSolaris 2008.11 on there just for kicks!

Developer, Kernel / Internals, Linux/Unix, OpenSolaris, Operating Systems, Tools / Products, Windows, hardware, software amd, amd64, hypervisor, ia32, ia64, Intel, linux, pacifier, PC, solaris, vanderpool, virtual, virtualbox, virtualisation, virtualization, virtualpc, vm, vmm, vmware, vt, Windows, x64, x86

OpenSolaris 2008.11 has just been released, it encompasses some super cool new features and I’ve been waiting patiently to try this OS - need something new to learn!

The OpenSolaris 2008.11 operating system is a point of integration for the installation, desktop, and package management system projects on OpenSolaris.org. Today, the OpenSolaris 2008.11 live CD is available with the following feature updates:

ZFS Time Slider and Songbird;suspend/resume and CPU power management; Distribution Constructor and Prototype Automated Installer; WebStack with 64-bit MySQL, CherryPy, and DTrace for Ruby; GNOME 2.24, OpenOffice.org 3.0, and Firefox 3; Many F/OSS applications added, including top, sudo and Emacs; 700 additional man pages and Package Manager online help

Just a bit of background, OpenSolaris is based on Solaris, which was originally released by Sun Micro-Systems in 1991. Sun decided to release Open-Solaris to build a developer community around their Solaris product. Eventually it seems they will be basing technology for Solaris from OpenSolaris. So you know OpenSolaris will rock your world if its backed by Sun.

Download page for OpenSolaris 2008.11 or Direct Download of ISO and the 2008.11 Release notes.

Checkout the newly revamped OpenSolaris website, in particular the Learn area. Personally I’m looking forward to seeing the ZFS, Virtualisation Enhancements and DTrace loving.

Developer, Its My Life, Kernel / Internals, OpenSolaris, Operating Systems, hardware, software OpenSolaris, operating system, solaris, storage, sun, zfs

Developer, Gaming, General, Its My Life, Operating Systems, hardware, humour, software clean, computer, crazy, daily dilbert, dilbert, fix, funny, house, humour, literature

BD+ is the DRM system for Blu-ray discs, as Wikipedia puts it:

BD+ is a component of the Blu-ray Disc Digital Rights Management system. It was developed by Cryptography Research Inc. and is based on their Self-Protecting Digital Content concept. BD+ played an important role in the past format war of Blu-ray Disc and HD DVD. Several studios have cited Blu-ray Disc’s adoption of the BD+ anti-copying system as the reason they supported Blu-ray Disc over HD DVD.

One of the more humorous observations was that unlike DVD (which used DeCSS for its copy protection system) and AACS which powered the bulk of the HD-DVDs of the time that BD+ would uphold its protection for atleast the next 10 years. This may have been one of the key factors in the HD-Wars, but alas it seems someone  has found a way of traveling into the future and finding the break.

Oopho2ei (who claims is not a professional programmer :O) from the Doom9 forums along with a few others (bmnot, schluppo, Disabled, evdberg) have (it seems) successfully broken the BD+ protection scheme in a grand total of 5 weeks and 3 days (started on the 24th of August). They have restored the BD+ protected “The Day After Tomorrow”:

I am glad to announce the first successful restoration of the BD+ protected movie “The Day After Tomorrow” in linux. It was done using a blue ray drive with patched firmware (to get the volume id), DumpHD to decrypt the contents according to the AACS specification and the BDVM debugger from this thread to generate the conversion table. The conversion table is the key information to successfully repair all the broken parts in m2ts files to restore the original video content. This small tool was finally used to repair the main movie file “00001.m2ts” according to the conversion table.

To verify the correctness i compared my 00001.m2ts with the one AnyDVD-HD creates and they both match. The MD5 hash of this 30GB large file is in both cases “0fa2bc65c25d7087a198a61c693a0a72″.

Breaking the code is no simple feat, Oopho2ei and team has had to reimplement the VM that runs the BD+ protection layer and realises that there’s a fair chance that it could be blocked at a later stage and may phone-home:

There has to be some kind of firewall around the virtual machine which validates all communication between the ( potentially hostile ) content code and the outside world (traps and events). Part of the rules which are enforced by that firewall are the parameter checks on every trap call. It’s obvious that the traps and the event handling itself has to be carefully implemented. I believe this additional effort is necessary to prevent the content code from breaking out of it’s sandboxed environment and do nasty things like gathering user information and “calling home” when it detects an unlicensed emulator. So because these additional security measures make things more difficult i suggested to test this code first with the easy traps.

Even a guy from SlySoft (who makes the ever popular AnyDVD-HD product) chimes in early on but backs off after realising he could well get the sacker.

I’ll just say: due to certain properties of BD+, once you’re past a certain point, you can handle it pretty much without reversing - BD+ itself then helps you out - on any player

…

Actually you’d have to know how BD+ really works, to know what I meant (and even then you probably wouldn’t ).
But if I start unraveling that, I’d be finding myself looking for a new job by next week

Love this bit in one of Oopho2ei posts:

I would like to stress again that this project wasn’t intended to circumvent copy protection and promote piracy. This can already be done using commercial software like AnyDVD-HD. Instead this project was an attempt to enable users of open source operating systems (like linux) to playback their BD+ protected discs without having to use proprietary software. Furthermore only two movies “I Robot” and “The Day After Tomorrow” have been proven to be handled correctly so far. Obviously there is still a lot of debugging to be done.

Classy! Download a copy of the BDVmDbg build for educational reasons and try PortableBDVM which comes in C99 source form.

Developer, Kernel / Internals, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Security, Windows, hardware, software aacs, anydvd, bd, bdvmdbg, blueray, bluray, crack, dcma, decss, Disney, doom9, drm, dvd, h.264, hack, hacked, hd, hdcp, hddvd, Intel, Matsushita, microsoft, Oopho2ei, Panasonic, portablebdvm, reverse, slysoft, sony, video, virtual machine, vm

Unless you’ve been living under a rock under the Apple tree you would have heard that a little company in Redmond WA has been working on a new version of Windows dubbed Windows 7 (which is what it will actually be called for once!).

At PDC today, Microsoft finally unveiled the much-anticipated release of Windows 7 and handed out pre-beta bits to atendees (tagged 6801.winmain_win7m3.081020-1655). They demonstrated a newer build which was tagged 6933.winmain.081020-184 during PDC which unfortunately was not given out. Unfortunately I couldn’t go due to work constraints, but in case your in the same boat I’ve collected some of the best sources of info out there for you to browse through.

First and foremost, some pretty pictures of the glassy new desktop UI.

Some interesting articles out of the many out there that are recommended reading:

• PC Magazine’s Inside Windows 7 Pre-Beta - Probably the first thing you should read.
• Extreme Tech’s Why Windows 7 Will Suck Less Than Vista - Offers a comparison between Vista and 7

For the pretty screenshots, see galleries here and here. More information and probably a bit more discussion will follow soon.

EDIT:
ArsTechnica have got an updated build reviewed which goes into bit more depth too and NeoWin has posted a nice gallery walkthrough of the Win7 UI and details about Vista SP2.

.NET / CLR / C#, Developer, Operating Systems, Tools / Products, Windows, hardware, software apple, beta, bill, longhorn, microsoft, operating system, pdc, pre-release, redmond, seven, sp2, steve, vista, vista sp2, win7, Windows, windows 7, winmain

We are giving away all of our software for free on Tuesday, October 28th, 2008. This is a fully working, fully supported copy of either CrossOver Mac Professional, or CrossOver Linux Professional. No hooks, tricks, timebombs, or gimmicks: it’s the real deal.

Yes you read that right, thanks to the Lame Duck challenge posted by CodeWeavers earlier this year, they’ve had to ruffle some feathers in the upper-management team to release their software for free as per their challenge:

The catastrophic cratering of the global economy, falling gas prices and President George W. Bush’s recent executive activities have indirectly prompted Saint Paul gadfly software developers CodeWeavers, Inc., to provide free software for every American on Oct. 28, company officials reluctantly announced today.

In July, CodeWeavers – whose software lets Mac OS X and Linux users run Windows programs without having to Microsoft for a Windows OS license – launched the Great American Lame Duck Presidential Challenge (lameduck.codeweavers.com) to encourage President Bush to make the most of his remaining days in office by accomplishing a major economic or political goal by January 20, 2009.

What were those challenges?

The goals focused on President Bush making specific positive accomplishments in areas such as the economy, home values, the stock market, the war on terror and other key issues. Specifically, one goal called for President Bush to help down bring average gasoline prices in the Twin Cities to $2.79 a gallon.

On Monday, Oct. 14, gas prices in Minneapolis and St. Paul did just that.

“That morning, I was filling my tank at Big Steve’s Gas Palace in St. Paul,” said Jeremy White, president and CEO of CodeWeavers. “I had just finished my morning corn dog and 64-ounce Dr. Pepper when I looked at the pump and noticed gas was at $2.79. I screamed ‘Woohoo,’ then I yelled ‘Oh, crap!’ as I realized every American can now have my software for free. Kind of upsets my fourth quarter revenue projections…”

Quick, go signup and grab a free bargain. Its not restricted to just US citizens either - and both Mac and Linux versions of Codeweavers is available. Cheers big ears, thanks for your efforts!

For the next round of freebies, the challenge has been set as follows…

• Return the stock market to it’s 2008 high
• Reduce the average price of a gallon of milk to $3.50
• Create at least one net job in the U.S. this calendar year
• Return the median home price to its Jan. 1, 2008 level
• Bring Osama Bin-Laden to justice

As a parting thought of wisdom from the greatest and most widely known comedian IN THE WORLD, I leave you with:

“It is clear our nation is reliant upon big foreign oil. More and more of our imports come from overseas.”
- Beaverton, Oregan, Sept. 25, 2000

Such deep deep meaning, you can find more inspirational words of wisdom from The Complete Bushisms.

Cool Tools, Developer, Its My Life, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Windows, hardware, humour, software america, bargain, bush, bushism, codeweavers, dubya, dumbass, free, george bush, linux, mac

Everyones favourite cool trend-setting company, no not Google, I’m talking the fruity company it seems has gone stinky with its premium quality, fresh, low-fat Big Mac Pros.

From an article published in TheRegister:

A French newspaper is claiming some Mac Pro owners are at risk of developing leukemia and other ills from breathing in toxic materials emitted from Apple’s top-of-the-line PCs.

According to Paris newspaper, Libération, an odd odor given off by some Mac Pros could be the result of several toxins used in the machines, including benzene.

“The computer emitted fumes which, after a week of use, caused a pronounced irritation of the cornea and respiratory passages,” he told Libération.

…

“We have identified seven volatile organic contaminants,” the lab’s Bernard Tailliez is quoted saying. The notable ingredients are styrene, benzene, and its derivatives.

The Apple forums do indeed contain posts about the smelly Pro’s which start from may last year, to quote coogie2 who made the initial comment:

It’s not a plastic smell. The best comparison I can make is if you would pour water on your carpet in the middle of the summer and let it go for a few days. That musty, mildewey smell.

That’s not a smell I’d want to have to put up with on a daily basis at work. According to a blog on the Guardian, it seems the units in question were made in China and not in Apple’s Cork factory in Europe.

Unconfirmed stories suggest the problem Mac Pros have been built in China, not at Apple’s European factory in Cork. If so, the risk could affect few or no UK users.

In either case, all jokes asside if you notice a smelly rotten musky fat Apple you’re best to call AppleCare or Support team (“Its your money. You paid for it.” (1:58), so make the most of it) and get them to look into it.

If they dont address this soon, I smell a lawsuit. Maybe Stevo could send a personal open letter out apologising for the stink bombs himself?

Libération claims that after contacting Apple France, they were told “engineers are working on the problem.”

Lets hope for a quick resolution, maybe its all just a big PR stunt from the Microsoft camp and the smell is really your half-eaten cheesy Big Mac.

hardware, software apple, health, mac