A Penguin in Purple Clothing

Wednesday September 15, 2004

OpenIB on sparc64/linux

One of my skunx works projects for a while has been to play with sparc64/linux. I have a couple of old e250's in the lab and a blade 100 on my desk that run Debian Sid sparc64. Well, since Roland wanted to test more platforms for openib, I said I would check out sparc64. I got it to compile with a few minor tweaks.

On Monday, I spent a bit of time trying to debug an interaction between openib on Linux and Sun's Infiniband subnet manager (ibsrm) on Solaris. I was getting byte swap issues on the wire because I was using a x86_64 client with a sparc64 host (x86_64 is little endian, sparc64 big).

I thought it might be a problem with ibsrm, so I asked Jeremy from the East coast to take a look. While he was setting up a Linux machine to test with it, I thought I would try a different tack.

If I ran openib on sparc64, there wouldn't be an endian issue, so I thought I might get a little further.

I needed to upgrade the firmware on the Tavor IB card and I had two options: pull the card and stick it into a Solaris box or try to get the recently open sourced tavor flash tool working on sparc64/Linux. The latter seemed more interesting, plus I wouldn't have to go into the lab and touch hardware :-) After Roland helped worked out a struct packing issue, the tool compiled and I took the leap. Luckily, it worked and I didn't end up with a dead card.

Next was to get the tavor driver working on sparc64. This required a bit more, as the openib code mostly assumed that the PCI configuration was x86ish. Sparc64 has an IOMMU and only allows you to DMA into a 32bit address space. In any event, once again Roland pulled through with a quick hack to take out the x86 assumptions the driver loaded properly.

Next on the plate: get IPoIB working with IBSRM.

(2004-09-15 18:35:17.0) Permalink

Tuesday September 14, 2004

Fixed my thinkpad

Yeah! I fixed my Thinkpad. I took the screen off of my old one and moved it to the one I got off of Ebay, and all is well. I have a working laptop again! I also moved the memory, put a new harddrive in there (cause the old one was making lots of noise). And I got a new battery out of the whole deal that holds a charge. All for only $100.

It is funny, cause the laptop I got off of Ebay had a sticker on it saying "DOD Sanitized". So, I can only imagine what this guy was used for before. Better not to ask.

In the end, I guess the system board was bad (or maybe the CPU). I may fiddle with the old laptop at some point, try to get it to display to an external monitor, or something. But, after using a Fujitsu for a few weeks, boy am I happy to be back on my IBM. I still think Thinkpads are the best laptops on the market...

And my friend Mike finally made it to SF (actually Fremont, but close enough). We are having dinner tonight. I haven't seen him in ages (probably 6 or 7 years). Well, he emailed me recently, said he came out of the closet, and was high tailing it to SF. I don't really blame him cause West Virginia isn't exactly the most friendly places for queers.

(2004-09-14 08:39:42.0) Permalink

Wednesday September 08, 2004

Opteron Systems

So, I got my dual Opteron PCI Express system back up again. When I first got the board, Q and I stuck in into a temorary case. Now that we got the permanent cases in, Q transfered the board. Alas, a few issues arrose. For one, the video card was removed for another system, so I had to move that back (it is a Nvidia PCI Express Geforce 5300). But, I wasn't getting any display working. Turns out it was because it was going through a bad Belkin KVM. Once I hooked up the video card directly to the monitor, it worked fine. Although it wasn't finding the hard drive. I realized that when Q hooked up the CD ROM, he put that on the primary bus and the hard drive on the secondary bus. I thought maybe that was causing the issue, so I reversed them. Still, it didn't find the drive. I poked in the BIOS for a bit trying to figure out what the problem was. I had to upgrade the BIOS on the board anyways for it to recognize the dual GigE ports, so I did that (which was fun trying to find a DOS boot disk to do it from!).

I finally did get the hard disk to work, and it turns out it was a jumper on the disk -- it was set to "Master with slave present" and did not have a slave device on the bus. So, I removed the jumper and vwalla, it booted again. I am running Fedora Core 2 x86_64 with the latest kernel (so that it will use the forcedeth driver for the nforce gige ports).

So, tomorrow I should be getting in the PCI Express Infiniband card to play with. That should be interesting.

(2004-09-08 17:19:38.0) Permalink Comments [4]

Tuesday September 07, 2004

Back to Work

I have spent the majority of today catching up on email. Man, there is a lot of it. I finally feel like I made a dent, but I still have quite a bit of catching up to do.

This Thursday, I will be meeting a bunch of the OpenIB guys at a hotel in SF to talk about the development effort. Should hopefully be productive.

In other news, my T21 parts laptop from Ebay arrived while I was gone. FedEx dropped it off at my neighbors (which I find somewhat convenient, but also a bit distressing -- what if I didn't know my neighbors?). It was missing memory and a hard drive. I put a stick from my broken laptop in and tried booting the Ebay one. It came up to a very messed up looking screen, but I could tell it was the BIOS POST. Tonight, I plan on plugging it into an external monitor -- I want to verify the motherboard is ok before I swap it with my broken laptop.

Also, Aub's desktop is acting funny. Maybe overheating due to the hot weather in San Francisco. She turned it off, and I should look into it tonight. So, I will be having a fun hair pulling evening ahead of me.

(2004-09-07 15:59:52.0) Permalink

Monday September 06, 2004

Back from Burning Man

Kat (Aub in the default world) and I got back from Burning Man yesterday night. We bailed a day early because Kat was not feeling well and done with the whole event. It was quite a stretch to get her to come in the first place, but she made it through most of it.

I had a better time this year than last year. Maybe it was because Kat was with me, or because I drank less, or that the weather was better. But, it was a good year and quite an adventure. We had three injuries in our group (none of them serious and not Kat or me). We had a propane tank "explode" when JR forgot to set the lift gate on our truck correctly, it fell 5 feet and the regulator broke off. Most of this happened early in the week, so we had a relatively uneventful second half.

The burn night was fun, but also relatively uneventful. Anyways, I have put the photos we took on the web, so check them out here.

I couldn't post any more on the web while I was there because it was s00per flaky. I guess that is what you get for being out in the middle of nowhere in the most desolate part of North America.

Back to work tomorrow :(

(2004-09-06 20:04:43.0) Permalink Comments [1]

Sunday August 29, 2004

On The Playa

Hey folks, I am on the playa! YEAH!

After all odds, I have made it. There was much work to get here. I drove my poor Honda to Walnut Creek packed to the gills. It kept hitting bottom on the road. I got most of the shit into the BAT (Big Ass Truck) once in Walnut Creek. Unfortunately, the BAT did not make it whole. A tire blew on the way, and it was a huge ordeal to find a new tire for the truck. The truck arived late after getting the tire replaced. In any event, there is wireles Internet on the playa!

OK, more later...

(2004-08-29 23:25:01.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Saturday August 28, 2004

Hair Dye and Ziplocks

I post this just before going to bed. Last weekend, when Aubrey's bestest friend in the world, Emily was in town, we went to the Haight during our tour of doom. Aub was psyched about getting hair dye for Burning Man. I reluctantly said sure. So, I got blue. I just got through dying my hair, and it looks...grey. I guess that is what happens when you mix brown with blue. Anyways, Aub looks awesome with rose red hair.

So, hours before we depart, Mr. Grey and Ms. Rose hit the hay with most everything ready and worries cast to the wind...right...

See ya'all on the playa!

(2004-08-28 00:41:06.0) Permalink

Friday August 27, 2004

Burning Man

Today is the last day before I head out to the Nevada Desert for Burning Man. This will be my second year going and I will once again be camping with the Spock Mountain Research Labs. I have my list of things todo before going and hopefully it will be shrinking quickly. I think I have everything:

• 24 gallons water - check
• bandaids - check
• AA batteries - check
• fixed bicycle - check
• ziplock bags - check
• baby wipes - check
• hat - check
• suntan lotion - check
• mister bottle - check
• biodegrable soap - check
• inflatable mattress - check
• work gloves - check
• large tarp - check
• large tent - check
• chairs - check
• googles - check
• dust masks - check
• beer - check

I know I am forgetting something. I always do this: go nuts before a trip thinking I don't have everything I am supposed to...

This year my fiance, Aubrey, will be coming with me. It will be her first time. She is quite nervous about going. I think things will be fine. I worry about the preparation. She worries about what happens when we get there. See, we have it all designated out so all the worrying is taken care of.

I will try to update this journal while out there. There should be Internet. Last year we had a satellite uplink (provided by ex-Sun'er John Gilmore if I am not mistaken) with 802.11b network. Rumor has it that this year, there will be a microwave uplink to Gerlach, Nevada. The org has a T1 there that they will connect into. This should be less bandwidth, but significatnly better latency. Making working from the playa potentially easier...but who wants to work on the playa?

(2004-08-27 09:35:24.0) Permalink Comments [2]

Thursday August 26, 2004

John's going away lunch

I have worked with John for many years. When I first came out to Silicon Valley after college, I started at Silicon Graphics. John started two weeks before me. Then, when my firt manager Simon left, John stepped up to the plate to become the manager of the Linux kernel group. John left SGI to go to a startup called Afara and I left to go with him about a month later. He was my manager there. Then, Afara was acquired by Sun and he stayed my manager here over the past two years. Now, John is leaving Sun to go to Apple. He will manage the kernel group there and work for Simon who is the director for OS X at Apple.

Today we are having a going away lunch for John. I will miss having John as a manager since we have develeped a close working relationship over the past 5 years. But, the good news is that Brian will be taking over for the group and so things should go smoothly. Ok, off to the Tied House for me!

(2004-08-26 11:32:44.0) Permalink

Wednesday August 25, 2004

IBM Thinkpad T21

I have for a long time espoused the virtues of IBM's line of laptops. So have all my friends. Thinkpads are the only laptops that can survive Burning Man. I got a used T21 a couple of years ago and have been nothing but happy with it. I run Gentoo Linux on it and compile everything from scratch. It is a work horse and I have never had a problem with it.

Until a week ago. Now, when it boots, it only lasts about 10 minutes before just shutting off. Then, it won't come back on for a half an hour or so. Sounds like a thermal problem, no? Well, that is what I figured, too. So, I opened it up, took off the heat sink and fan from the CPU. Lo and behold, all of the thermal grease had moved off of the chip. I applied some new stuff, put the thing back together, and thought I was golden. WRONG. The laptop still has the same issues. It shuts off after 10 minutes of use. So, I am at a loss. I don't have a working laptop to bring to Burning Man. :-(

UPDATE (8/27/04)I just won a parts laptop on Ebay (another T21 for $96; has a broken screen, but a working CPU/motherboard/fan). I will be getting this soon and hopefully, this will fix my issues. In the mean time, I am using a work laptop, a Fujitsu Lifebook S6110. I like that this has a middle mouse button like the T21, but I don't like the keyboard layout as much. I installed Fedora Core 2 on it the second I got it. Most everything worked out of the box: display, sound, etc. I think this is supposed to have a builtin wireless, but I cannot get Fedora to find it. I am using a PCMCIA card instead.

(2004-08-25 12:06:05.0) Permalink

Monday August 23, 2004

Hello World

Hello world. Just thought I'd start this blog site. I am in Sun's NSG East group, working out of Menlo Park, CA.

I am working on Linux on x86_64. This involves supporting a next generation platform with SMP x86_64, PCI Express and Infiniband.

I also am working with the openib.org group to bring a complete and stable Infiniband software stack to mainline Linux.

(2004-08-23 11:33:28.0) Permalink