Kool Aid Served Daily

I got a pNFS community and client to run under VMWare on a XP box. Okay, so I made sure to make independent clones of the same machine as before. And this time I went from 512M to 1G of available RAM. The other thing I changed is that when building the cthon tests, I changed the config a bit.

I went from 512M to 1G because the archive updates were taking forever on the clones with 512M but went fast on the one with about 2G:

updating /platform/i86pc/boot_archive
updating /platform/i86pc/amd64/boot_archive

I'm talking 45 minutes or more. Once I pushed the memory up, these updated much faster.

I used the following configuration for using gcc on a 64bit OpenSolaris:

[tdh@m-client cthon04]> diff tests.init ~/cthon04/tests.init
57c57
< PATH=/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/etc:.
---
> #PATH=/opt/SUNWspro/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/etc:.
61c61
< #PATH=/opt/gnu/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/etc:.
---
> PATH=/usr/sfw/bin:/usr/ccs/bin:/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin:/usr/ucb:/etc:.
133c133
< CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc
---
> #CC=/opt/SUNWspro/bin/cc
135c135
< #CC=/opt/gnu/bin/gcc
---
> CC=/usr/sfw/bin/gcc
138c138
< CFLAGS=`echo -DSVR4 -DMMAP -DSOLARIS2X -DSTDARG`
---
> #CFLAGS=`echo -DSVR4 -DMMAP -DSOLARIS2X -DSTDARG`
145c145
< #CFLAGS=`echo -DSVR4 -DMMAP -DSOLARIS2X -DSTDARG -m64`
---
> CFLAGS=`echo -DSVR4 -DMMAP -DSOLARIS2X -DSTDARG -m64 -D_FILE_OFFSET_BITS=64 -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE`
150c150
< LOCKTESTS=`echo tlocklfs tlock64`
---
> #LOCKTESTS=`echo tlocklfs tlock64`
152c152
< #LOCKTESTS=`echo tlocklfs`
---
> LOCKTESTS=`echo tlocklfs`

In the previous run, I hadn't set -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE and I didn't fix LOCKTESTS correctly. While the -D_LARGEFILE64_SOURCE might have been what was killing me, I don't think so.

The DS hung during the write/read of the 30 MB file. It was unresponsive on the console. I heard the disk chugging, I killed off Thunderbird and Firefox. And it did come back. My guess is that the 512M on the earlier systems was insufficient. I've had problems in the past with virtual machines that were trying large IO. (A real machine wrote a 50G file to a NFS simulator and they complained about the speed. They shut up when I had them go against the real box.)

So the experiment works. I'm working on VirtualBox on the side still.