So Microsoft will be starting to produce Linux software. This would never have happened under the previous CEO. With this change, Microsoft’s addressable market just grew fairly significantly for this product. Of course, there are ways for them to mess this up. Such as if they have features only available under windows. That would rather permanently consign this product to the dustbin of history. This said, I am hopeful that this CEO gets it, and will make sure that the changes Microsoft needs to make, are, in fact, made.

and find that you wrote on a mailing list almost half a decade ago about the problem, that it hasn’t been fixed. This is a little sad.

Long story but it was a time sensitive POC bug. I like the switch I was using, but we needed this up ASAP. Customer was waiting. So I yanked all the 40GbE cards from the servers, put in multiport 10GbE, set up 802.3ad LAGs. Then moved to the Arista in the lab (great switch BTW). Its been years since I set one up, so out came the manual. Read up on setting up the LAGs and port channels … I had forgotten why I liked using them so much.

A bunch of Unison systems, a 40 GbE network interconnecting them, and a bunch of client nodes on 40GbE -> 4x 10GbE links (to accomodate enough clients for the load testing). 40GbE < -> 40GbE works great. Full bandwidth, only minor oddities (single thread performance around 27Gb/s, need multiple threads to hit 40). 10GbE < -> 10GbE works great. Full bandwidth, nothing odd. 10GbE -> 40GbE works great, get about the expected bandwidth (10GbE).

Turns out next Ubuntu is fully baking in ZFS into the kernel and distributing it. This seems directly contrary to the licensing CDDL vs GPL, and chances are some folks will be unhappy with it. The big question is, will the IP holders sue. Because if they don’t, they may actually have given up their right to sue. Or has Canonical obtained a license to distribute. This is my understanding as I am not a lawyer, so I can’t really be sure of this (and I’d recommend you ask one if you are not sure).

This is a start, not ready for release yet, but already useful as a diagnostic tool. I wanted to see how my IRQs were laid out, as this has been something of a persistent problem. I’ve built some intelligence into our irqassign.pl tool, but I need a way to see where the system is investing most of its interrupts. I omit (on purpose) IRQs that have been assigned, but have generated no interrupts.

I just spent 30 minutes trying to figure out why the 32 bit q process would run on one machine, while the identical tree and config would fail with a license expired on my desktop (development box). Turns out one should check for an old license file in one’s home directory. /sigh I think I need to send an RFE for an ‘–low-coffee-mode’ option.

Yeah, I know. It brings all manner of capabilities with it. Its just the cost of these capabilities, when combined with other tools, like, say, Docker, that make me not want to use it. To wit: root@ucp-01:~# ls -alF /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/ total 52508 drwx------ 2 root root 80 Jan 29 22:38 ./ drwx------ 4 root root 80 Jan 29 22:38 ../ -rw------- 1 root root 107374182400 Jan 29 22:39 data -rw------- 1 root root 2147483648 Jan 29 22:39 metadata root@ucp-01:~# ls -halF /var/lib/docker/devicemapper/devicemapper/ total 52M drwx------ 2 root root 80 Jan 29 22:38 .

Good wrap up of last years trends, this week at InsideHPC Radio Free HPC podcast. We get a small mention around 10:50 or so. Thats not why its an especially good listen. The team arrived at many of the same conclusions we did last year, which is why we brought out Forte, and we have some additional products planned in that line for later on in the year. Basically NVM and variants, NVMe, etc.

We’ve got customers with very large resource machines. And software that sees all those resources and goes “gimme!!!!”. So people run. And then more people use it. And more runs. Until the resources are exhausted. And hilarity (of the bad kind) ensues. These are firedrills. I get an open ticket that “there must be something wrong with the hardware”, when I see all the messages in console logs being pulled in from ICL saying “zOMG I am out of ram ….