Keith Bierman's Weblog

Wednesday January 25, 2006

Porting OS to SPARC (e.g. Linux, BSD, etc.) In the old days, it was a bit of  Black Art, mostly restricted to people at Sun or people who knew which bar stools to sit on (so they could ask questions of the RightPeople off the record ;>).

It's just gotten a lot easier. For formal documents for theUltraSPARC T1

As for where to ask those questions, there's the formal forum

Not that I'd discourage anyone from buying the appropriate lads and lassies a good drink to pick their brains, but it'll be a lot more helpful if the questions (for any OS port) start out on the OpenSPARC site. That way, one answer will go to a lot of people ;>

NiagaraCMT

OpenSPARC

Linux

BSD

Thursday January 12, 2006

I like Coffee, I like Tea.... Enough people have asked me about some of our beverage options at Hacendia Bierman, that I thought I'd record our usual recommendations here. It's nontechnical, other than the frequent association of caffine with programming ;>. I have no finanical stake in any of these providers ... other than hoping they stick around because I like their stuff.

For green beans and supplies, I rather like Sweet Maria's. Good prices, good service and good products. We have an Alpenroast drum roaster. Given that my wife really likes light roasts and I prefer dark roasts we might have been better off with two smaller roasters. But it's a good roaster and a lot of fun. I haven't managed to reproduce Peet's Mocha-Java :<

For brewing, we have several systems. The one we use the most is the fully automatic expresso machine, an older Saeco Magic Delux.

For tea, our favorite oriential tea shop is in Mountain View California. The nice thing about using real tea leaf (rather than chopped up dust in bags) is both taste and reuse (typically I get 5-8 pots out of one batch of leaves). The folks at MVTV import directly from plaintation .. so there's very good consistency and pricing. Really nice tea isn't cheap, but it's worth every penny. (2006-01-12 12:23:30.0) Permalink

slashdot on Linux Stability I found this to be an interesting read. (2006-01-12 11:45:58.0) Permalink

New SPARC architecture documents Are on the way. See this thread on the OpenSPARC site.

(2006-01-12 11:29:46.0) Permalink

Wednesday January 11, 2006

What license should OpenSPARC employ? The discussion has just begun over on the OpenSPARC site

[ T: OpenSPARC ]

Thursday January 05, 2006

An old classic...available online! It's been so long since I read CAR Hoare's CSP tome that I'd completely forgotten about it, until I spotted a reference in an archived email that I'd completely missed.

For those interested in formal reasoning about some special kinds of parallel processing, CSP is probably worth revisiting (if you are old enough to remember when it was published) or worth a read for the first time if you are young enough to have missed it ;>
(2006-01-05 11:32:03.0) Permalink

Monday January 02, 2006

Why worry about my workload? The folks at Anandtech have again proved that they understand a lot more than just desktop games. The article is worth a close read. There's a handy table comparing the IPC (instructions per cycle) of several famous "standard" benchmarks.

Understanding how the workload you have (or expect to have) relates to standard benchmarks is vital if one is to have any hope of having benchmark performance reflect what you will see down the road ;>


  href="http://technorati.com/tag/NiagaraCMT" (2006-01-02 15:22:39.0) Permalink