Thushan Fernando Uncut

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

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

Epic news, Google has released a 1.0 release of Chrome.

We have removed the beta label as our goals for stability and performance have been met but our work is far from done. We are working to add some common browser features such as form autofill and RSS support in the near future. We are also developing an extensions platform along with support for Mac and Linux. If you are already using Google Chrome, the update system ensures that you get the latest bug fixes and security patches, so you will get the newest version automatically in the next few days.

You can download a windows version today, the Linux & Mac OS builds are still in development.

Cool Tools, Developer, Operating Systems, Web / Internets, Windows, software browser, chrome, explorer, firefox, google, internet, konquerer, linux, mozilla, opera, safari, web browser, webkit, Windows

With the amount of coverage surely to be taken by Windows 7 we can’t forget the other side of the force, Ubuntu 8.10 Intrepid Ibex was released a few hours ago.

Believe it or not I actually stayed up waiting for it to hit the servers, then hopped over to the iinet FTP server (mirror’d by the Internode servers also) as the 3FL Mirror (Westnet) wasn’t up to date (it is now!) and started leeching the sucker.

8.10 brings:

• Linux Kernel v2.6.27 - which has the new Atheros driver, improved webcam support and support for the UBFIS file system, among other things documented on KernelNewbies.
• Support for the UBIFS file system - especially for SSD/Flash drives in the hope it will improve performance and longetitivity of such devices.
• GNOME v2.24 - which brings a slew of improvements including a tabbed nautilus.
• X.Org v7.4 - includes Xorg-Server 1.5 which brings faster startup/shutdown times, hot-plugging for input devices.
• Network Manager 0.7 - which adds 3G and PPPoE connectivity
• Dynamic Kernel Module support - recompiles kernel modules automajically when kernel is updated.
• LOTS more, documented in the 8.10 Release notes.

Mono 2.0, Python 2.6 and OpenOffice 3.0 didnt make the cut but will be present in 9.04 already dubbed the Jaunty Jackalope.

Download Ubuntu 8.10 and give it ago. For a complete look at Ubuntu 8.10, checkout these reviews:

• Simple Thoughts - Ubuntu 8.10 Comphrensive Review
• Polish Linux - Ubuntu 8.10 A Positive Evolution
• The Linux Format - The LXF Test

Whilst I’ve had to hurry off to work with barely a few hours of sleep I did catch a few minutes of usage after a speedy install thanks to the USB installation method.

Developer, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, software arthos, dynamic kernel module, free, Gnome, KDE, Kernel, linux, network manager, new, open source, operating system, release, ubfis, ubuntu, webcam, x.org

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

A few days ago OpenOffice 3.0 got released after 3 long years of development. You should download a copy and give it ago. To be perfectly honest, because of my MSDN suby’s I never really needed OpenOffice nor did I particularly like v2.x, but v3.0 is a breath of fresh minty air with a ray of bright Sun light beaming down from the heavens. The only times I’ve ever tried was under Linux, and even then I’ve often gone for Abiword instead to avoid the bloat.

It feels far more responsive than the 2.x versions I’ve tried, heck it even loads a helluva lot faster too and doesnt seem to chew up the resources 2.x did.

The Office Word compatibility has improved greatly. Learn more about OpenOffice 3.0 on the Linux Format article.

Then if that wasnt enough, Microsoft today launched Silverlight 2, which finally heads out of beta. Havent had a great deal of time to play with Silverlight but from the demos it looks kick-ass.

.NET / CLR / C#, Developer, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Tools / Products, Web / Internets, Windows, software .NET, flash, linux, microsoft, office, openoffice, sliverlight, Windows, word

I’ll admit it, I still have a floppy-drive attached to my maturing beast, which is primarily used as my day-to-day development box. Floppies come in handy for that odd install of XP or below that require RAID drivers (though you can just use nLite and bundle it by default).

But what about the CD-R’s and DVD-R’s in the days of Cloud Browser based Operating Systems (funny)? I recall burning ISOs like no tomorrow when new versions of Ubuntu were released - and I’m sure everyone else who has gone down the Linux or BSD route has had similar experiences.

But before you go burning that ISO at the next install (maybe Ubuntu Intrepid Ibex at the end of the month) you might want to consider an alternate route - and whats more, I’ll bet you it will install faster on newer systems.

I bought a Corsair Voyager GT 16Gb (pdf info-sheet) flash drive a few months back, whilst I’ve been fairly disappointed that its advertised speed fell short of expectations due to the Samsung manufactering process changes, I still kept it dear to myself having paid about AUD$109 for it. (I name things, the drive was dubbed DrSporky). Even though its rated at about 34MB/S read (so realistically it should do about 25-30MB/s) I’ve managed to clock about 19-21MB/s copying a 500Mb file using Teracopy - a real benchmark not a synthetic test and 8Mbp copying it back to the drive (see below). Nothing to sneeze at, but the difference between the GT and the non-GT was the 30MB/s+ read-speed I figured.

I use it almost daily and it carries around a bootable version of Ubuntu 8.04 (Hardy Heron) thanks to the multi-platform utility UNetbootin.

UNetbootin is written in C++ using the Qt4 Toolkit engine (full information is available on the Universal Netboot Installer page on Launchpad) so its compatible on Windows and Linux. Simply download the latest version, insert your USB drive and either let UNetBootbin download the distro you’d like to try _or_ browse to the Disk image to one you’ve already grabbed.

Give it a go and see what you think, installing Ubuntu 8.04.1 on a mates system (ASUS P5KPL-CM & Core E2180) took less than 10minutes (at most 20 if you inlude boot and configuration)!!! The best part is that you can easily reuse it easily formatting etc *AND* store your own things ready to utilise whenever you need it.

So the next time you got install _anything_ give UNetbootin ago and make use of that fast USB Drive instead of wasting CD/DVD writables that you usually endup throwing away.

Its My Life, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, Windows 16gb, bootable, bootable usb, bootcd, corsair, flash, gt, iso, linux, mlc, nand, samsung, slc, ubuntu, unetbootbin, UNetbootin, voyager, Windows

Linus just released Linux Kernel 2.6.27 to the stable tree after 9 release candidate releases. Some highlights include:

2.6.27 add a new filesystem (UBIFS) optimized for “pure” flash-based storage devices, the page-cache is now lockless, much improved Direct I/O scalability and performance, delayed allocation for ext4, multiqueue networking, an alternative hibernation implementation based on kexec/kdump, data integrity support in the block layer for devices that support it, a simple tracer called ftrace, a mmio tracer, sysprof support, extraction of all the in-kernel’s firmware to /lib/firmware, XEN support for saving/restorig VMs, improved video camera support, support for the Intel wireless 5000 series and RTL8187B network cards, a new ath9k driver for the Atheros AR5008 and AR9001 family of chipsets, more new drivers, improved support for others and many other improvements and fixes.

You can read more about the changes on Linux Kernel Newbies guide on Linux 2.6.27.

If you’ve been looking into the very heavily publicised and incredibly serious Intel Network adapter e1000 corruption bug then you’ll be glad to know that it seems that its fixed (which was initially put into 2.6.27 -rc9). If you grabbed any of the Ubuntu Intreprid Pre-releases then you may have been affected - though later the modules were black-listed.

Now that Linus has started blogging, he gives a unique glimpse into the release process and how it differs from that of his previous company Transmeta.

So I tagged the release five hours ago, and during the few days before that I had barely a score of commits to merge. But now that I have cut the release, my mailbox is starting to come alive with merge requests for the next version - with thousands of commits queuing up for merging in just a few hours, as opposed to the slow trickle in the days that went before.

This is all exactly as it should be, of course, but it still feels bass-ackwards, in that people always talk about the death-march to a release, and how you’re supposed to take a well-deserved vacation after the release.

For example, when I worked for Transmeta, the hardware people would basically take a month off after doing a tape-out. That seems somewhat natural just deserts. But when it comes to Linux development the “tape-out” of making a release acts the other way around. The calm was before, now comes the week or two of crazy merging.

Read more on his blog post about On Making Releases. One wonders when he actually takes any form of vacation to relax without carrying around a lappy.

Developer, Linux/Unix, Operating Systems Kernel, linux

ntop is a network probe that shows how much the network is being utilised with very little overhead and impressive graphical representation via the web. Its definately a must-have tool if you run a fileserver.

The version of ntop on the ubuntu mirrors is 3.2.x, so I set out to update to the latest release this weekend (3.3.x released in June last year).

This install is being done on Ubuntu 7.10 using ntop 3.3.7.

First up lets download the distribution of ntop we’re going to be installing. This is the internode mirror in Australia, but you can find your closest mirror via sourceforge.

$ wget http://internode.dl.sourceforge.net/sourceforge/ntop/ntop-3.3.7.tar.gz

Next we need to extract the files to a folder.

$ tar -xvf ./ntop-3.3.7.tar.gz

Next up lets install/make sure we have all the dependencies we need to build this version.

$ sudo aptitude update
$ sudo aptitude install build-essential linux-headers-$(uname -r) librrd2-dev libtool libpcap-dev tcpdump librrd2 rrdtool rrdtool-tcl libgdbm-dev libgdbm3 automake autoconf automake1.7 debhelper gettext html2text intltool-debian libgd2-noxpm-dev libjpeg62-dev libncurses5-dev libssl-dev libwrap0-dev po-debconf

Once the dependencies are installed you can go into the extracted folder and tell it to setup the environment and configure it.

$ cd ./ntop-3.3.7/
$ chmod +x ./autogen.sh
$ ./autogen.sh

This will make sure your environment is correctly setup and configure to build the necessary make files. There shouldn’t be any errors at this point as you have installed all the correct dependencies. Nextup we need to build the application and install it.

$ make
$ sudo make install

Then you can start nTop by running the following command:

$  sudo ntop -P /usr/local/lib/ntop/

There we have it, browse to http://localhost:3000 and you’ll be running the latest and greatest ntop.

Linux/Unix, Operating Systems, software guide, howto, linux, software, ubuntu

One of the most kick-ass players out there has just released a new version after more than 2 years in development. VLC 0.9.2 which comes with a spanking new UI and a host of cool new features.

enuff chit-chat, go download and install.

NOTE: The server is no doubt being hammered right now, so be patient.

Developer, Tools / Products, software linux, mac, media, player, software, video, Windows