Tuesday Feb 22, 2005

An end to Gonzo

RIP
Hunter S. Thompson
Gonzo Journalist
1937 - 2005
Time to bring out the rum.

Monday Feb 21, 2005

And now for something completely different

Finally remembered this site. You've seen t-shirts with the usual comment on them, eg "Been There, Kissed That". That kinds of thing. Well Hairy Baby throws a decent Irish slant on the story. Not your usual Irish t-shirt of the like you'd be seeing in them there tourist shops. This one being a prime example.

And there are indeed some baby t-shirts too.

Friday Feb 11, 2005

With Samba

Solaris 10 comes bundled with a good deal of free software; bash, apache, gtar, gnome as well as samba the windows fileserver for unix. An idea came up on the samba-tech interest list here. One had the nice idea of building a "performance auditor module" for samba. This module would collect data about say the number of times a samba vfs call is made and perhaps the average time the call took.

While this module can be written for samba, I'd imagine it as another vfsmodule, the data can already be collected without any a single new line of samba code being written. Yeilding something like:

Counts of each function:
  vfswrap_dummy_connect                                             1
  vfswrap_dummy_disconnect                                          1
  vfswrap_chdir                                                     2
  vfs_ChDir                                                         3
Average times spent in each function:
  vfswrap_dummy_disconnect                                       7192
  vfs_ChDir                                                     11772
  vfswrap_chdir                                                 32179
  vfswrap_dummy_connect                                        288427
Times are in nanoseconds, so divide by 1000000000 to get things into more human readable numbers. And heres the dtrace script
pid$1:smbd:vfs*:entry
{
        self->start = timestamp;
        @counts[probefunc] = count();
}

pid$1:smbd:vfs*:return
/self->start/
{
        this->elapsed = timestamp - self->start;
        self->start = 0;
        @avg_times[probefunc] = avg(this->elapsed);
}
Within Sun we're using dtrace like this on an on-going basis. Build one version of a piece of software, benchmark it with dtrace, build a newer version, benchmark it with dtrace again and note any differences which can show any regressions (if any).

Tuesday Feb 01, 2005

Solaris 10 out and talked about

Like many others, I'm saying Solaris 10 is out and about. Go try it, play DVD's with it ;), compile stuff with it -- gcc is included. See the huge amount of gnu software shipped with it.

Typically Slashdot has already posted about it.

One thought seen from the Slashdot posts is a wonder where the AMD64/Opteron/64bit Solaris 10 is. Just like Solaris 9 (on sparc) was/is, the 32bit and 64bit kernels are bundled together in the same release. Downloading the version for x86 will give one the ability to use either the 32bit or 64bit kernels on a AMD64 machine, be it an Athlon64 or Opteron type. All you folks with those Ferrai laptops now have 64bit kernels.

One last item, to actually boot the 64bit kernel on an AMD platform use this command:

 # eeprom boot-file=kernel/amd64/unix
 # reboot

Off to watch some DVDs this evening on the laptop. Using Solaris 10 of course.