Thushan Fernando Uncut

Sun Microsystems (pwnd by the Oracle) has release VirtualBox 2.2.4.

VirtualBox 2.2.4 (released 2009-05-29)

This is a maintenance release. The following items were ?xed and/or added:

• Windows Installer: ?xed a potential hang during installation
• Windows Installer: ?xed several problems (bug #3892)
• Solaris hosts: make it work with Solaris build 114 or later (bug #3981)
• Solaris hosts: ?xed a bug serial port character handling found during loopback (bug #3120)
• Linux hosts: adapted vboxdrv.sh to the latest changes in VBoxManage list runningvms (bug #4034)
• Windows hosts: ?xed a crash caused by host-only/bridged networking
• Mac OS X hosts: ?xed access to host DVD with passthrough disabled (bug #4077)
• Guest Additions: ?xed problems with KDE 4 not recognizing mouse clicks
• Windows Additions: ?xed incorrect 8-bit guest color depth in Windows 7 guests
• GUI: warn if VT-x/AMD-V could not be enabled for guests that require this setting (bug #4055)
• VMM: ?xed occassional crash due to insuf?ent memory
• VMM: ?xed hanging 64 bits Solaris guests
• VMM: restore from a saved state occassionally failed (bugs #3984 and #2742)
• Clipboard: ?xed a deadlock while shutting down the shared clipboard on X11 hosts (bug #4020)
• OVF: ?xed potential hang during import
• OVF: ?xed potential crashes during import/export on Win64 hosts
• VBoxManage modifyhd –compact: ?xed bug which could lead to crashes and image corruption (bug #3864)
• VBoxManage metrics collect: now ?ushes the output stream.
• VHD: made VBoxManage internalcommands sethduuid work for .vhd ?les (bug #3443)
• VHD: some .vhd ?les could not be cloned (bug #4080)
• VMDK: ?xed creating snapshots
• NAT: improvement of TCP connection establisment (bug #2987)
• NAT: ?xed order of DNS servers in DHCP lease (bug #4091)
• NAT: ?xed DHCP lease for multiple name servers (bug #3692)
• NAT: ?xed a potential segfault if the host lost its connectivity (bug #3964)
• Shared Folders: deny access to parent directories on Windows hosts (bug #4090)
• Shared Folders: make rm/rmdir work with Solaris guests on Windows hosts
• Networking: ?xed the problem with blocked receiving thread when a broadcast packet arrives too early to be handled by uninitialized e1000 adapter.
• Networking: ?xed the problem that caused host freezes/crashes when using bridged mode with host’s interface having RX checksum of?oading on (bug #3926 and related). Fixes problems with TX of?oading as well (bug #3870)
• PXE boot: Added support for PRO/1000 MT Server adapter.
• Python bindings: ?xed keyword con?ict
• SCSI: ?xed occasional crashes on Win64
• Serial: allow to redirect the serial port to a raw ?le (bug #1023)
• VRDP: ?xed a rare incorrect screen update

This release’s most significant update is the bugfix for truncating your files to 300Kb when attempting to compact the hard-disk – damn annoying! Update mos def.

Download:

• VirtualBox 2.2.4 for Windows hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 2.2.4 for OS X hosts Intel Macs

• VirtualBox 2.2.4 for Linux hosts

• VirtualBox 2.2.4 for Solaris and OpenSolaris hosts x86/amd64

• VirtualBox 2.2.4 Software Developer Kit (SDK) All platforms (registration required)

Enjoy, oh btw did you know that OpenSolaris 2009.06 is coming tomorrow (Monday?)

I’m nothing special, in fact I’m a bit of a bore
If I tell a joke, you’ve probably heard it before
But I have a talent, a wonderful thing
cause everyone listens when I start to sing
I’m so grateful and proud
All I want is to sing it out loud

Sooo I sang, thank-you for the memory tuning options for the JVM Andrew Hall, you’ve made my day. Andrew has written an excellent article detailing the inner workings of the JVM and how it manages memory, it goes quite deep starting with Kernel vs User Space, how the JVM uses native memory (including some examples to show running out of native memory), how to detect/measure heap usage and finally how to move over to the 64bit world with some caveats (native 64bit binaries for JNI libs etc).

Well worth the read.

Oracle Corporation

Sun Microsystems

In what may come as a suprise to everyone, Oracle Corporation has bought Sun MicroSystems for a cool $7.4Billion benjamins. IBM was eying a buyout for quite sometime but (I reckons for the better of mankind) has failed to secure the epic deal.

Question is, what will happen to the buyouts such as VirtualBox (Oracle has a hypervisor which launched in 2007 and is based on the Xen Hypervisor), MySQL which was acquired by Sun a while ago (Oracle has this little RDBMS called Oracle btw), OpenOffice which will have another O  added to it (oooo  its OOo).

On the brighter side though, Oracle did kick off in 2007 the upcoming Btrfs filesystem and with Sun messing about with CDDL and patents in ZFS, maybe we can finally get something happenning to push ZFS into Linux?

Then theres the future of Java, DTrace, oh gosh so so many questions, so many unknowns. I guess we’ll have to follow the white rabbit and see how things goes Neo.

My favourite hypervisor, VirtualBox has just been upgraded to 2.2. Sun ushered in v2.2 recently and this release brings some uber-goodness. From the changelog;

This version is a major update. The following major new features were added:

• OVF (Open Virtualization Format) appliance import and export (see chapter 3.8, Importing and exporting virtual machines, User Manual page 55)
• Host-only networking mode (see chapter 6.7, Host-only networking, User Manual page 88)
• Hypervisor optimizations with signi?cant performance gains for high context switching rates
• Raised the memory limit for VMs on 64-bit hosts to 16GB
• VT-x/AMD-V are enabled by default for newly created virtual machines
• USB (OHCI & EHCI) is enabled by default for newly created virtual machines (Qt GUI only)
• Experimental USB support for OpenSolaris hosts
• Shared folders for Solaris and OpenSolaris guests
• OpenGL 3D acceleration for Linux and Solaris guests (see chapter 4.8, Hardware 3D acceleration (OpenGL), User Manual page 70)
• Added C API in addition to C++, Java, Python and Web Services

Enticing, whats more you can build a virtual machine, export it from a test environment (QA Labs) and then push it into production and fully supports the Open Virtualization Format (OVF) standard. Download your copy and give the new version ago, I’m definitely noticing a speed bump in our QA test VMs.

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.