XenServer performance tweaks!

Just a few notes I'm making here about performance tuning on XenServer 5.5.0 - this is pretty much unsupported by Citrix, but since it's "just" Linux and if you have enough nous, it does make a difference.

To get your NICs bonded using an industry standard link aggregation protocol (like LACP), drill down to /etc/modprobe.d/bonding and modify as follows:

options bonding mode=802.3ad miimon=100 downdelay=200 updelay=200

(I wish XenServer used a more modern kernel then I could specify ad_select=bandwidth xmit_hash_policy=layer2+3 too)

This pretty much makes your NIC bond work the same way your switch does, instead of using Linux's own bonding system. For our Cisco switch this works better. You can also go in and edit interface-reconfigure and supply your own bonding defaults (perhaps a little nicer, you can also fix your MTU here without unmanaging your NICs), or try and set these as "other-config" options but that's just a pain in the backside to do for every VM.

Want better performance out of NFS SR's, have an NFS4-capable SAN? Drill down to /opt/xensource/sm/nfs.py and modify the line 64:

options = "soft,timeo=%d,retrains=%d,proto=%s,noac" % (SOFTMOUNT_TIMEOUT,

(the difference being the protocol is prefixed with proto=) then line 69:

util.pread(["mount.nfs4", "%s:%s"

(the difference simply being that the script calls mount.nfs4 instead of mount.nfs)

And that's it. We reduced latency by a couple milliseconds, and got a ton of extra bandwidth out of it (~380MB/s instead of 130MB/s) versus NFSv3. That's before enabling jumbo frames.

Geit PowerDev Meeting Webcam

Power Developer 2.0.1.1.2.9.99.999.40.19

Edit 26th November 2008: there is so much to do this is yet again on the back burner, there is a lot of work to do on the power2people site and other work which takes up most of the day. One day there will be a new site (check out the work done by the "new web team" on the Genesi USA main site) but not right now.

A year later and I'm still working at this, although Projects and a lot of the front page have been reworked a lot, I'm working on a real design document to integrate EVERY user suggestion (blog syndication & comments, wiki-style pages - including a forum that supports wiki formatting, the long-awaited RCS integration (I still can't decide if Subversion or Mercurial is best for this) and a bunch of other stuff) and hopefully making things more of a coherent whole and easier to update anything and everything.

Space: 2099?

Working at home has some advantages, like flexible hours, but the one that's keeping me amused right now is coding with Space: 1999 in the background (gotta love the digital channel revolution in the UK, 30 public TV channels with little on but re-runs of 70's shows :)

I wish they'd remake this. After Battlestar Galactica comes to a close this year, we're going to be watching re-runs of THAT. I know Ronald D. Moore and the Battlestar show-running team are fans of Space: 1999 and I am sure they would jump at the chance; and why not?

It was sci-fi with real intelligence that inspired the story arcs and clever episodes of Deep Space 9, and the new Battlestar (and was depressingly absent from things like Star Trek Voyager, Andromeda, and even Stargate SG-1 etc.) Rethinks of the best episodes with new ideas, plonk on a Bear McCreary reimagining of Barry Gray and Derek Wadsworth's show themes, updated special effects, relevent social and political commentary (Battlestar's handling of terrorism, suicide bombing, prisoner treatment and military justice all around the events in Iraq and Afghanistan, and the obvious election fixing hubub all went to make the show accessible)

I wonder though, since naturalistic science fiction is all the rage these days (Battlestar's wired 1960's-retro-style handset phones and lack of aliens are a another great example), how would you justify sending the moon out of Earth's orbit? Somehow someone has to gel the fantastic of the 60's and 70's with the realistic (and based on real science) of today.

Oh yeah and it has to have Juliet Landau in it. I mean she's the daughter of the two stars of the original, and I bet she could lend a decent hand to it :)

Here's hoping anyway. Next blogs will be about work, I promise :)

Dragging the 20th Century Boy into the 21st..

Coming to a browser near you;



We've changed the sites we run a lot over the years but each time we have pretty much steered clear of modern browser technology since we have been trying to support operating systems like MorphOS and the lower-end browsers on all platforms (Dillo on Linux is a good example) by not using too much CSS and Javascript.

Since MorphOS has a KHTML/WebCore (that's 'like Safari' to you and me) browser in the late stages of development, there's little point now in keeping a pretty site bogged down in nested tables, hardcoded image backgrounds, invalid HTML and nasty Netscape 3.x tricks.

So, since last week along with the other site updates we've been working on, I've been poking around with CSS, reducing the code footprint of the content engine and adding all kinds of neat stylesheets which improve the look and feel of the website and hopefully make it a more comfortable place to visit. One of these changes will - hopefully - be upgrading the forum to PHPBB 3 for a more pleasant forum experience.

The picture doesn't show much; but it's the changes behind the scenes that make all the difference. The page loads significantly faster - after all, there is less of it. There is less code dynamically generating layout and a lot less (rather pointless theming) imagery to stall your browser. Logic in the code which rudimentarily spaced things out to make them easy to read are now in a stylesheet - which is ostensibly compressed, and cached at your end, so you don't have to wait for that. There are less tables so the page renders faster, too.

I'm pretty excited about doing it, it has been a hard few years being a webdesigner that could not use any heavy CSS. The step after getting Power Developer squared away will be the rest of the Genesi web presence - the store most importantly. We will leave MorphZone and the MorphOS Developer Connection until last just because I want Sputnik to be out of beta for real. That is not to say that MorphOS gets a back seat! We're just taking it one step at a time.. :)

The case of..

We have our first production case, comes in many colours, but this blue is really quite nice :)



http://www.blastwave.org/dclarke/blog/?q=node/29

Thanks Dennis.

Efika 5200B Galleries

One gallery for Power Supplies - Sven Luther of Genesi took these pictures to show off his new PicoPSU along with his new Efika.

Another for cases - this is a rather ingenius case made out of the box the Efika came in. If this isn't "green" I don't know what is. It's possible mainly because the entire system even with the graphics card generates very little heat.

You can also make a case out of any 5.25" drive case (for USB, SCSI or so on) as the Efika has been designed specifically to fit in the same space as a standard half-height CDROM. These chassis are usually very cheap if you buy them without the drive, in fact sometimes cheaper even than PC cases.
Why not buy two, and a cheap DVD drive, so your Efika stack can read DVDs via the USB port?

Developers, Projects, Plans..

The Efika 5200B program is in full swing; boards are going to go out next week to everyone who has an approved project (some are still under review but we will finish this up before the final ones are shipped). As said before we have collated some basic information and all the relevant documentation on the board that will be useful to developers. This support will expand heavily in the next few weeks, based on developer feedback.

There are some great projects in there, and I hope we will see some highly innovative uses for the Efika board and Power Architecture in general.

Once the boards are out there, the roadmap is to get the features everyone needs to fulfil their requirements - grouping developers with similar projects to work together and Collaborate, Subversion and Git repositories for developers who want it, email aliasing, pretty HTML mails for commits and mailing lists for groups of developers (along with the forums). We don't plan to replace such resources as Berlios or Sourceforge (after all they do a great job) but to provide a simple interface which is neither intrusive nor overcomplex. All we ask is the developers update their "Project Blog" with their progress, after all Freescale, IBM and other partners and interested parties check the site all the time and may be more than a little interested in where you guys are going with your ideas.

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The next step; provide the dual-core 8641D boards, and do something with the PlayStation 3! I think it is quite exciting what Sony have done with their "open platform", it marks a significant departure from the previous strict, proprietary nature of the traditional games console, but unfortunately a lot of the guys who need to do the work in bringing up distributions are in Europe and they have to wait until March to get their hardware.

I think we at Genesi are well placed to handle an effort centralising and supporting the development of PlayStation Linux and other operating systems. We have already started to set things up to enable these users and developers. A lot more is coming, but at the end of the day it should be up to YOU guys to tell us what YOU want out of it. Tutorials are a good start. We are collating every snippet of information on Cell and PS3 we can and it will go onto the site.

Maybe we could provide easy access to the system (perhaps a few online for 'free' use through the Projects program) and we will definitely be providing more support for the existing Cell and PS3 development community. I would love to know what the community thinks of this, and what they actually require - beyond all the previous discussions we have had on PowerDeveloper and Power.org forums, especially as that was all well before the release of PS3 or any consumer-level Cell hardware.

Have fun, guys, and good luck with those projects!