Erik Fischer's Weblog: CPUs and more

Unix time will reach 1234567890 on the 13th of February. Some envisions the end of the world, or at least end of the digital world. Will it really happen? Read on...[Read More]

Finally I have released the 1.8 final version of the paqt performance acquisition tool to Sourceforge.

The new release has many features:

• Patch database changes
• XPG4 id utility bugfix for Solaris 2.4
• Minor optimizations and restructuring at various places
• Disk usage estimation bugfix (missed OS and platform dependancy handling)
• Integrated check to avoid collision with another paqt script
• Fix of sun4v system handling errors
• Fixed cluster interconnect virtual network interface bug
• Fixed of iostat inconsistency
• Gathering /etc/system, /etc/vfstab, /etc/path_to_inst
• Gathering modinfo
• Gathering data on configured processor sets, pools, projects and rcaps
• Gathering psrinfo -v and psrinfo -pv output
• Added poolstat and rcapstat (-P flag)
• Added intrstat (Solaris 10 and after) (-I flag)
• Added Solaris 10u3 and 11 fsstat (-F flag)
• Added Solaris 10u2 zfs iostat (-z flag)

Telling the truth, it was ready around the end of 2007, but I was way too busy to test it in various environments and did not intended to post before I have tested it. But as of now, the script worked fine in many projects, so I am confident enough to release it.

I have also started to wort on the next release 2.0, which has a list of serious improvments...

Well, it looks like Solaris will be an official course at the Budapest University of Technology and Economics starting from September 2008 and I will be the lecturer. The course was just approved by the University and will be based on the OpenSolaris source code and architecture.

I was fed up with the noise of my home system, which in the meantime also grew old. So I started to mod the rig piece by piece. First I have changed the power supply, which was an ordinary and stock Chaintech 400W power supply to a relatively silent 450W Corsair supply. The next job was to move the stock fan to something considerably silent. So I have found the Scythe S-FLEX fans, which uses Sony's Fluid Dynamic Bearing system to be completely silent even at 1200 rpm. A 12cm fan can make significant airflow even at lower speed. However, it was not enough. I wanted to control the rotational speed of all fans, so bought the Zalman ZM-MFC2 controller, which immediately gives me the possibility to check the power consumption of my system. Finally, I have changed my old Asus Nvidia 7900 GT to a way faster and overclockable Galaxy 9600 GT OC. I also dropped two 40GB PATA Seagate drives and replaced them with a 300GB Seagate SATA disk. Another serious source of both power and noise level saving. Finally, the whole box is almost silent and it consumes 120-130W in Internet browsing mode and only 220W if I am running an FPS full resolution with all features turned on... Before the changes, the "idle" consumption was around 135W and the gaming power was close to 260W. The next step to change to CPU to a Core 2 Quad 9450 and the motherboard to an Asus P5KC and reuse the Zalman 9500 CPU fan... or to move to a Scythe Ninja Plus... In this case, it will be a fully passive CPU cooling...

So how blog addict I am? Looks like I am still over 50%:

52%How Addicted to Blogging Are You?

Returning to blogging[Read More]

This was an enormous year and thanks God, it is almost over now. I am over many things, moved to a new flat, my first son had a very-very serious brain surgery - but he is well and almost forget even the long days of immerse pain -, and my second son was born. I personally finished a very tough and extremely long running security project and did a couple of other "interesting" projects. Tuned almost 15 systems and analized twice as much. I am not any more an SE Manager, since CS kicked in. By the way, it was way too rude, how Sun did it. Sorry for being personal, but how Sun did it with me... Anyway we rolled out very interesting products and even more interesting things are coming (Solaris 10, Vulcan, Panther and Niagara). These products, the Hungarian team's extraordinary talent, team spirit and "care for each other" and the international Ambassador community keeps me still at Sun. By the way, I also passed my tenth year, which makes me realize, I have already spent very much time at Sun... However I would like to say to all of my friends and fellows within Sun: Keep on, folks and keep me alive as well.

Unigraphics announced, that the company will not support Itanium in its next gen NX3 product...

This is my first blog post and I am still figuring out what should go to this blog. It is not that trivial as I though first, so I am in the middle to create my playbook.