cuddletech
One of the great mysteries of ZFS is prefetch. Failing to understand these, how they work, and what they intend to do for you, can cause a lot of confusion, so here we'll dig our fingers into the subject. The first thing to understand is that "ZFS Prefetch" may refer to file-level prefetch and/or the virtual device read-ahead cache; we'll discuss both here. VDev Read-Ahead Cache (SPA) When reading data from spinning media, the bulk ...
I need to buy a new office chair. My $100 Ikea office chair that I've used for the last couple years finally is beyond what duck-tape and super-glue can remedy and its time for a change. In looking at Ikea's current selection of chairs I see no equivalent replacement and thus am having to look elsewhere. So I take a trip to my local OfficeDepot store and see what they have.... a big line up of high cost low quality chairs. Suddenly I'm ...
Here is an example of why I hate April Fools: Rackable Systems Announces Agreement to Acquire Silicon Graphics Inc., and here is the press release by Rackable: RACKABLE SYSTEMS ANNOUNCES AGREEMENT TO ACQUIRE SILICON GRAPHICS INC.. A joke? No, apparently not, unless the SEC is in on it, here is the SEC Form 8-K filed today: SEC FORM 8-K RACKABLE SYSTEMS, INC. And so, the end of an era... finally and officially. SGI is dead, may she ...
The UNIX world is ablaze with speculation about the news that IBM wants to acquire Sun. Rumors of acquisition have been floating around for a long time, but the fact that institutional investors help almost double JAVA shares means we should take this one very seriously. To be frank, I'm not sure how to feel about it. I'll try and play both sides therefore. On one hand, IBM's hardware business has a great many advantages over Sun's. ...
I'm pretty sure I need this... The Cray CX1™ "personal" supercomputer. Its essentially a desk-side 8 blade enclosure that works with less than 15A on a 120V circuit. Awesome!! Besides, don't all us "old" UNIX guys miss the days of $100,000+ workstations? My Ferrari 430 Scuderia is gonna have to wait. Besides, I can't tell you how nice it is to once against think Cray is Cool.
My relationship with DTrace has been a rocky and strange sort of round trip. Like most folks, when it first arrived I built up a stash of one-liners, generally to expand upon output from vmstat and the like, such as to show execname for each page out or something. With Brendan Gregg's DTrace Toolkit I found several fun well written script and used them where appropriate. But frankly, serious DTrace use seemed to me to be akin to mdb use... ...
Everything is confirmed. Sun has invited me to CommunityOne East in New York next week to present a one-hour version of the 30 minute ZFS In the Trenches talk I gave at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit. The session will be on 3/18 at 10:10 am - 11:00 am in breakout room 5. If you are using ZFS, live in or around New York and want more insight into ZFS please come on over. Secondly, this blog has been fairly slow lately.... here is ...
I'm a comic book fan... still read both Iron Man and Capt America actively. The following review is intended as contrast to the graphic novel and attempts to avoid spoilers. First and foremost, let me say that the movie was an amazing translation of the book to the big screen. Everything looks just the way it should, more or less, and I was amazed they captured it so well. There were some small changes, most notably the costume ...
I've embraced the reality more and more that LinkedIn has replaced the resume. This post on Slashdot convinced me that its worth saying publicly. For what its worth, I don't like LinkedIn. It limits the data that you can present thus causing a lot of what would be on a resume out. Such things include an inventory of skills, various extra work accomplishments, publications, and the like. Its a little too focused on job history and ...
Extended Accounting is one of the many under appreciated features in Solaris, and quite possibly the worst documented to boot. So, it's time to fix that. Accounting, in general, is a means of recording data about resource utilization, CPU in particular, with the intention to be used primarily for reporting and billing purposes. Conceptually it could be confused with Auditing (see I See You!: Solaris Auditing (BSM)), in that they both ...