Dan Poirot and Robin Ristow

A Tale of Two Utilities...

2007-02-04T05:20:56-08:00

It's OK, we will leave Dickens out of this one...

A prospect asks if Wind River Platform for Network Equipment - Linux Edition is going to work on his CentOS 4.4 system. Officially we support RHEL WS 3 U5, RHEL WS 4 U2 and SUSE 9.3 and 10. ...so let's see!

The CentOS site claims "CentOS 4.4 is an Enterprise-class Linux Distribution derived from sources freely provided to the public by a prominent North American Enterprise Linux vendor. CentOS conforms fully with the upstream vendors redistribution policy and aims to be 100% binary compatible."

Sounds very encouraging. I am off to get CentOS CD images. No great big DVD ISO to be found so I am faced with downloading four separate images. This could take forever with the web browser and leave me with partially downloaded images if any of the download fails. Worse yet, aggrivating Internet Explorer only wants to download up to three files at a time.

Enter GetRight Download Manager. Back in the day, download managers were all the rage when all we had was dialup. GetRight has done a fine job of keeping up with technology. I found that it could easily manage downloading all four files, split each download up to five times for parallel downloads and even search for the fastest download site FOR EACH FILE on it's own! So cool. It soaked my cable modem and I had trouble free downloads of the images in no time!

On to the installation... CentOS looks oh so much like RedHat WS 4. No problems there. I am installing in a partition on my daughter's game machine. This is the same machine I used to play with HDTune and the RAID controller last year.

I fat-fingered the install. At one point the installer is setting up the partition table. I wasn't paying attention and selected the option to delete the partition table on /dev/hde. This worked out to be just one of the drives in my RAID. YIKES!

I am only as smart as GOOGLE... I enter "recover partition table" and get lots of help. The first few commercial tools, http://www.partition-recovery.com/ and Partition Table Doctor offer demos that show they can find my partition table! Hurray!

A little further along I find TestDisk 6.5:
It was primarily designed to help recover lost partitions and/or make non-booting disks bootable again when these symptoms are caused by faulty software, certain types of viruses or human error (such as accidentally deleting your Partition Table).

Sounds like just the ticket! I downloaded the Windows version, ran the program, accepted all the defaults and a reboot later had my RAID back! Slick.

The rest of the CentOS evaluation was much less traumatic. Everything just worked. They are using the same 2.6.9 kernel and RPMs as RHEL WS 4 so that really wasn't much of a surprise.

Linux drive development model turned upside down!

2007-01-30T08:12:23-08:00

In what one Slashdot-er describes as an 'epic announcement', Greg Kroah-Hartman has offered up the services of the Linux Kernel developer horde as free labor for device driver development.

No longer will hardware companies have to spend more than a moment to get a fully supported driver written by the experts in the field.

I guess we will see how this scales.

Rock on Greg...

- dan

Hello old friend...

2006-11-06T02:46:01-08:00

This just showed up in my Inbox in 14-point Marketing type:

Wind River To Support Sun's Breakthrough UltraSPARC T1 Multithreaded Next-Generation Processor

So 'Hello' old friend, the years have been really good to you! Has it really been 20 years?

SPARC and I are old friends. I was a Sun-4 and SPARC sysadmin back in the day when the greater fraction of the studio audience was stuffing quarters into the 'Ms. Pac-Man' machine down at the local arcade and pizza parlor. (I was a Tempest man myself) The SPARC was the picture of minimalistic performance - in a pizza box!

In that era it was very forward-looking for Sun to have had a second source such as Fujitsu for their chips. Vendors were encouraged to add their value to the 'eco-system' - before the term was cool. I still have my first SPARC 1+ mobo which had been displaced by a Rave Systems SPARC2 unit! Both sBus I/O cards and mBus CPU cards were readily available from third parties. This new announcement is a reenforcement of this original vision.

Wind River has provided VxWorks 5 support for both Sun and Force COTS V9 boards and still has customers using the V8 LEON version in Mil/Aero applications. Our VxWorks business on SPARC has dropped off as other types of processors have moved into the same levels of performance.

With the release of the UltraSPARC T1, Sun has once again taken the high ground on performance. Their decades of Solaris experience have lead to the development of a chip that is tuned for UNIX-type operating systems. The 64-bit T1 offers the option of up to eight four-thread cores. 72 Watts for eight cores may sound like a lot but both the Freescale MPC8641D and Intel Core Duo weigh in at over 30 Watts for just two cores...

...and now, Wind River returns to the story. In this Press Release, we announce showing Wind River Linux on the UltraSPARC T1. Talk about the right tool for the job! Cores and cores, threads and threads. Li-nuks never had it SO GOOD! This will be the measure that SMP Linux will be held to. "Do one thing and do it well" - but do 32 at a time!

Other OS choices include Sun's own OpenSolaris, NetBSD, FreeBSD and OpenBSD.

And to top it off, Open Source software on Open Source hardware.

The OpenSPARC initiative allows for free access to the GPLed Verilog chip design. Early projects and app notes include a single core version, a core realized in an FPGA and cycle accurate simulators!

The bottom line is that the OpenSPARC T1 project by Sun is the realization of many of the tenets of Device Software Optimization (DSO):

- Standardization of technologies, tools, and processes across the enterprise
- Embrace of open standards
- Reuse of intellectual property
- Operating system agnosticism
- A broad ecosystem of hardware and software partners

Linux? Real time? I don't think so...

2006-10-20T10:53:51-07:00

Phil Hochmuth asks the question "What do real-time additions to the Linux kernel mean for the real-time OS market?"

We are going to have to set him straight on one point real quick... Wind River is all about offering customers choice and Industry standards. ...but Linux and real time? Nope!

We can stand proud and point to our history with Linux. We have been criticized for changing our story but our story changed with the circumstances. We were not about to promote the 2.4 kernels. They just were not ready for our market - regardless of the number of patches. Real improvements in the 2.6 kernel gave us the chance to stand behind it.

The "real time" patches and extensions are the same story. We will support the technologies embraced by the community but we aren't going around telling folks that Linux is ready for real time.

Embedded, yes. A fine candidate for Device Management, yes. An enabling target for Device Software Optimization, you bet.

Real time. No way...

Why is my PC so slow?

2006-10-16T20:21:55-07:00

Howdy all. Why does it seem that my PC is so slow?

Back when I was a Wind River customer (yeah, yeah, dinosaurs walked the Earth and the planet's crust was still cooling) VxWorks 5.1 developers used the command line in a 'shadow' directory of the product distribution. Editing was done with 'vi' and BSPs and apps were built with 'make'. We lived in the era of 'burn and churn.'

All of this happened on big (for the time) shared Sun 3 boxes. PC's were a novelty -- the exclusive toy of the accountants and finance people (who didn't have any real work to get done.

These days the masses are blessed (or is it burdened?) with more computing power than they can figure out how to use. This has been a boon to distributed projects like SETI@home and Folding@home. Who would have though that there would be teraflops of performance in a video card?

But developers are (always) different! With the distribution of full OS and network stack source in the VxWorks 6 era, customers are building more of our product. At the same time apps are bursting in size. There never seems to be enough performance.

So why does compiling this take so long? I have a fast CPU and lots of RAM - what could it be?

HD Tune to the rescue! With a tiny bit of attention to detail and the addition of a $15 PCI RAID card, I now have a disk I/O screamer!

I started out in PIO mode because I had a problem with the chip set driver. Download pio0.JPG

I then went from UDMA2 Download udma2_40pin.JPG

to UDMA5 by simply swapping the 40-pin cable for a high quality 80-pin unit. Download udma5_80pin.JPG

All the best goodness comes from adding a $15 RAID card to the pair of drives I already had! Download SiL680a_RAID.JPG

This is really only a solution for local copies of files which are maintained in a reliable configuration management system!

Keep in mind with increasingly larger capacity disk drives (driven by serial ATA drives), the risk of drive failure is increasing. Additionally, bit error correction technologies have not kept up with rapidly rising drive capacities, resulting in higher risks of encountering media errors. In the case where a failed drive is not replaced in a RAID 0+1 configuration, a single uncorrectable media error occurring on the mirrored hard drive would result in data loss!

Given these increasing risks with RAID 0+1, many business and mission critical enterprise environments are beginning to evaluate more fault tolerant RAID setups that add underlying disk parity. Among the most promising are hybrid approaches such as RAID 0+1+5 (mirroring above single parity) or RAID 0+1+6 (mirroring above dual parity).

Howdy from Baytown!

2006-10-05T19:51:52-07:00

Ah, the first post! The innocent exuberance of a fresh start - a blank sheet! Alas, what do I get? Writer's Block... Oh well - it is what it is.

Let's start with a simple introduction. Hi, I'm Dan. I am one of the TAMs serving customers in Texas. I live in a self-proclaimed 'sleepy' town of 80,000 East of Houston called Baytown.

I snuck in an bit of WRS jargon - TAM. What is a TAM? At last - a topic!

The Technical Account Manager can best be described as the technical side of the team serving the customer. Everyone know what the Account Manager does - he brings the quotes! The Inside Sales folks - they make sure you get what you ordered and get regular calls to see that your account issues are attended to - all great folks.

...but the TAM?

Officially we are a pre-sales resource. We are there to help the prospect determine the best set of products needed to ensure success of their project.

In reality we also serve as design consultant, someone to bounce debugging ideas off of, advocate for the customer, emergency support, first responder to product questions and (too) often enough - trade show staff. You see us everywhere.

...I wonder if this will finally be a way to explain to my Mom what I do?

- dan