Search:
Where I Work
NKS
Subscribe
Add to Google
RSS 0.91
RSS 1.0
RSS 2.0
ATOM 1.0
RSS 2.0 and ATOM
Network
View Ian's profile on LinkedIn
Archives
2007 April (1)
2007 February (1)
2007 January (4)
2006 December (2)
2006 November (2)
2006 September (5)
2006 August (4)
2006 July (1)
2006 June (3)
2006 May (2)
2006 March (4)
2006 February (4)
2006 January (1)
2005 December (8)
2005 November (26)
2005 October (10)
2005 September (17)
2005 August (87)
2005 July (48)
2005 June (34)
2005 May (24)
2005 April (243)
2004 April (1)
2004 February (3)
2003 August (2)
2003 June (2)
2003 May (8)
2003 January (1)
2002 September (1)
2002 July (4)
2002 June (2)
2002 May (5)
2002 April (15)
2002 March (15)
Projects
CornFS
DENSO NAV
Rage Powered
Tampa Bay
TampaBad
SLUG
ob-buttons
Creative Commons OpenSource Linux Individual-i GeoURL Linux Speakeasy Speed Test
Twitter

follow icblenke at http://twitter.com
Google
Ian's shared items in Google Reader (subscribe)

Ben Heckendorn finishes second version of C64 laptop, will be auctioned for charity

Skype mouse slides open, features LCD screen

Google Voice gives users the ability to change numbers

Hack: use Google Voice to add visual voicemail to your G1, Dream, or Magic

New HTC Hero ROM leaked, Flash 10 already chugging along on a few lucky G1s

Mushroom Networks announces new wireless "Broadband Bonding" technology

Unlocking the “uncrackable” Medeco Deadbolt

Video: HTC Sense gets ported to the G1, Flash and all

iPhone OS 3.1 released to developers!

Behold the cupholder-friendly power inverter

OLED display-camera combo may have sci-fi-ish applications

Review: DirectFix’s iPhone LCD Repair Kit

Pirate Bay fires its copyright-busting cannon at YouTube

Irregular Magic IQ CUBE! OH! RUBIK BE DAMNED!

A vacuum tube chess set is just what you need

Nvidia plugin decreases Adobe Premiere Pro H.264 video encoding time by 11 times

High-altitude floating wind harvesters may replace your local windmills

The Future is Now: Metal detecting sandals

Heinz eyes USB-powered microwave for desk drones

Exclusive: MoGo Talk Bluetooth headset for iPhone folds down to 5mm thin — we’re giving 50 away, plus a 30% discount

Geektalk

Aviary.com

Browser based Server-side 3D gaming from OTOY

Cisco's replacement for the WRT54GL is the WRT160NL

Spinn3r.com - Index the blogosphere

Team ARIN

Parts of galaxy Messier 87 are missing

DRAEGER ALCOTEST 7110 MKIII-C Evaluation of Breathalizer Source Code

Cyclops

Google's AJAX playground

How Michael Osinski Helped Build the Bomb That Blew Up Wallstreet

Bruce Perens - A Cyber-Attach on an American City

How Google and Facebook are using R

adito - the new gpl fork of the old sslexplorer project

A date idea: forklift sunset

Psytechnics - VVoiP QoE

r1soft cdp

IP Address geolocation for free

Shapeways - $50 "3-D poem rings" until the end of the month

GrandCentral to become Google Voice

Wolframalpha is coming

Hosted Xen Project

VirtualGL X11 transport

TurboVNC VirtualGL == FAST network GL

Ben Rockwood's presentation at the OpenSolaris Storage Summit: ZFS in the trenches

The Crisis of Credit Visualized on Vimeo

10gen - a java based app hosting infrastructure

Engineyard Vertebra - another cloud infrastructure management harness

Eucalyptus - an opensource EC2 compatible hosting infrastructure

asciicasts.com

railsbrain.com <-- ajaxified rdoc

AP IMPACT: SWAT Teams Deployed in 911 fraud

Lessons learned by people who have quit Google

Makwana indicted for Fanny Mae malware

"physicalized" servers

Zentific svn repo: alpha available

Holographic Space-Time ?

DACS - Distribution and Configuration System - version 2.0

Video of Cisco IOS attack talk at Chaos Computer Conference

Cosmic radio background noise 6 times higher than expected

We get a leap second tonight

Grow your own bioluminescent algae

Johnson and Ruby/Javascript

Two turntables and a git repo

Quartz Composer and Cruise Control status

Truthy and stupid.rb

The nature of truth

Get2Human

Sunay Tripathi's Solaris Networking Blog

Merry Christmas from XKCD

Merry Christmas from Chiron Beta Prime

Prius Emergency Generator

German folk tune Jazz improv

Memcached speed improvements

FSF sues Cisco

Asterisk Vishing Alert

Google's Native Client... the next ActiveX?

Waterballs

YAGNI development assistant

HA-xVM demo video posted

Kemari 1.0 released - HA Xen

The Decline and Fall of Agile

Zone Alarm 2009 Free Tomorrow

kenai.com - xVM Server Project site

58% Spam Drop from one colo shutdown

Xenomips - a Xen friendly domU version of Dynamips - Emulate a Cisco 7200

Debian and Android dual-boot on the G1

Sipper (SIPr) - a SIP testing framework in ruby

DBslayer - a SQL abstraction layer using JSON

Clojure - JVM based LISP dialect with immutable persistent data structures that are inherently thread safe

Fingerworks keyboard in a MacBookPro

NfSen - Netflow Sensor

The Phoenix BIOS hypervisor is Xen

Do you live in a Constitution-Free zone?

Puppet presentation at NYCOSUG this month

Kemari - Xen lock-step HA

XenSmartIO - Infiniband IO for Xen

Starting with b100, OpenSolaris has virtual consoles

OpenSolaris testfarm build server interface now available

Firefox M9 Fenric - Maemo alpha

SystemZ - aka Sirius - a port of OpenSolaris to IBM System Z mainframe OS running in z/VM mode

40.8% efficient solar cell

FREDNET

World sunlight map

Solaris and ZFS on a Dell 2950, tweaking notes

Logstalgia

Early Access Windows PV drivers for xVM

Economics: The Theory of Interstellar Trade

COMSTAR Admin Guide PDF file

The Financial Crisis: What Happened and What's Next?

3.5" DIY SSD drive

Microsoft usurping ODF

Cisco to run Windows 2008 on their appliance virtually for services

Packetfence: an OpenSource Network Access Control system

Public.resource.org

persist.js - an alternative to gears

Chinese building "impossible" EM drive

Supertinykeyboard

COMSTAR SMTF - solaris FC, SAS, and iSCSI targets

Flexiscale - yet another control panel?

RightScale - cloud control panels?

GoGrid, a servepath company.

OSCON in 37 minutes

Criticial ESXi remote vulnerability in openwsman

Parasitic power

Microsoft FUD on VMWare: vmwarecostswaytoomuch.com

nmap builds zenmap topology maps

Don't forget about BarCampTampaBay

RubyConf08, In Orlando

The LHC accelerates, and that's what it's all about.

Fun with mechanical turk

Sun's launch of xVM, live webinar

Microsoft to give away Hyper-V for free, live migration by 2010

Ubuntu's Intrepid Ibex will be followed by Jaunty Jackalope

Why Xen traps negative segment offsets

Rails 2.1.1 more REXML bug fixes

ISO torrent for OS2008.11

Indiana OS2008.03 RN3 released - based on nv_b96

Skype Mobile Phone (Not in the US)

Youtube gets closed captioning support

Getting xVM to work on OpenSolaris 2008.05

Xen Memory Overcommit

Algae farming for biofuels

Mozilla Ubiquity

How a VoIP E911 call is handled

A critique of RDMA

MonetDB - a column based RDBMS, ideal for time series data

BarcampTampaBay

Intel's programmable matter

Nexenta Hackathon

The value of side projects

VMfaq's comparison of virtual storage IO

Xen 3.3 released

USB3.0 cables

Intel wireless power.

Xen and Solaris, a log of experience.

Adeona.cs.washington.edu

OpenSolaris CR#6654713 - 32G limit bug stemmed from bad USB hardware? Perhaps fixed?

Xen CPUID example config

OpenSolaris CommonArrayManager

Multiple zero capacity quantum communication channels can actually transmit non-zero amounts of data thanks to entanglement

Sharity-Light - smbfs derived samba clone

Drizzle, a thin mysql, generating buzz

VMWare to offer ESX hypervisor for free

Veedeeeyes

Dr Horrible's Sing-Along-Blog

Fan, the programming language.

Blackberry Thunder with Haptics keyboard

iPhone App Store Live Walkthrough now available

Google Protocol Buffers

Time to patch your DNS

Recent JVM benchmarks

Overclocking tool for the Mac Pro

ADO.NET Entity Framework (Microsoft's new ORM) given a non-confidence vote by beta testers

Ruby interpreter flaws make the case for JRuby

The Stalled Server Room

AdvFS - Tru64 filesystem ported to Linux

OpenSolaris 2005.05 repository update to b91 - follow these instructions carefully

SXCE can ZFS install as of b90

Vertebra: EngineYard's Next Generation Cloud Computing Platform

Skype 4.0 beta overhauls video chat

Mozilla org receives traditional IE cake

Toyota Prius to go entirely Electric

Bill Gates steps down permanently for philanthropic activities

Men write code from Mars, Women write more helpful code from Venus

SproutCore - a GUI event driven model javascript web development platform, rails based by the looks of it.

Finding ARPANET

DRBD LVM Xen = Bug. A rather nasty one at that.

Intel unveils Ct as an extension for C/C to encourage threaded programming for multiple cores

VMWare ThinApp - Run any Windows app on any version of Windows

JDBC adapter for HBase

JRuby-Rack <-- a JRuby port of Rack

Rack <-- a lighter cousin to Merb, fully threaded and no Mutex.

Datamapper.org <-- ActiveRecord like, with no need to do migrations, it just kind of handles that by itself internally automagically.

Solaris Cluster Express (SCX) 6/08 released.

a-i-studio.com/cmd

CMDLogParserDemo

Changing solaris' default password hashing

Texas based service provider explosion affects 9,000 servers and 7,500 customers.

Jruby on Rails on Tomcat deployed as as WAR file

Rubinius

Milkfish.org SIP Router

42 more of the best Linux games

42 of the best Linux games

XenWindowsGplPv drivers

Use Google's cached ajax libraries

Arduino microcontroller with OS/X

The metasploit page describing the full impact of the poor RNG.

Holger Bert's blog post on the openssl RNG fiasco

Cayac - Cherokee MySQL PHP5 phpMyAdmin

ZFS very slow under an xVM kernel

VMWare's review-board.org

Google DocType

Dynamically editing libvirt xml configs while a VM is running to redefine reboot flags.

Chronoton - the time travelling robot who's best friend is a talking pie game

Endace DAG

Your pizza is done

Rietveld - Google's code review tool

Opensource multitouch displays

RTL8139 drivers supporting QEMU tcp segmentation offloading (XP's default driver does not) - doubles networking speed of Xen HVM networking without using the GPLPV drivers

Corporate map.

Ono - an efficient way to locate nearby peers

Solaris CIFS integrated AD with ZFS acls

Samba Winbind and ZFS acl working together

Why's unholy Ruby to Python .pyc compiler

Zentific poll daemon 1.0 beta

Solaris SAM-QFS NFS and OS/X

OpenSolaris 2008.05 final ISO image

Twitter abandoning Ruby on Rails

HP makes memory from a once-theoretical circuit

AVS seamless with ZFS

OpenVZ live migration demo

Setting Up an OpenSolaris NAS Box: Father-Son Bonding - The Video

Linux kernel Xen self-ballooning patch

HyperVM

FuildVM

Coolstack - Yet another group of solaris packages

SFE - Spec Files Extra - or, solaris's ports system

ksplice - live linux kernel patching

ZFS-102-A.pkg - binary package build of newer ZFS for Mac

ZFS for Mac Project page

Changing boot flags for a solaris domU guest

RAM based SSDs

Augeas - a configuration API

callflow - SIP callflow diagram generator

sdedit - quick sequence diagram editor

Milax - The OpenSolaris Small Live CD

Sun close-sourcing MySQL

Intel hardware virtulization breaks kvm - if you're going to run HVM on Intel, you want Xen 3.2 for the improved software emulation of instructions broken in Intel's hardware virtualization

Big Nerd Ranch on Windows/Linux/Leopard single signon

Sun touts big plans for OpenSolars as first release nears

Heroku - EC2 based Rails hosting.

RIP John Achibald Wheeler

Meadowcourt's compiled WindowsXenPV driver, v0.8.8, as built from win-pvdrivers.hg repo

What's new in Solaris 10 U5

The Thing About Git

Network Solutions hijacks all customer's unused subdomains

ZFS Evil Tuning Guide

ZFS speed bump: set zfs_nocacheflush = 1

We Don't Use Software That Costs Money Here

Free NIC drivers for Solaris

Hubble - a PlanetLab realtime Internet "blackhole" monitor

Citrix price jumps on rumors of potential IBM/Cisco bidding ware

Segway RMP

TechCrunch labs on their AppEngine deployment

pash - because powershell was too cool to let microsoft keep to itself

Skeptologists

Google AppEngine

Brazil migrates 430 thousand boting machines to Linux

How xVM can be made to suspend/restore instead of shutdown/restart guests on reboot of the underlying xVM host.

The Machine Emulator - TME can emulate a sparc4 with OBP

SFE - spec-files-extra

OSCON2008 schedule

Google releases new GCC linker

Automatic generation of peephole superoptimizers

Zentific

Zentifi

Disabling nagle under Solaris

Xen.org Trademark Policy for Review

SXCE b85 has problems booting under Xen 3.2

OpenSolaris xVM sysadmin doc

VNRP == opensolaris quagga rbridges crossbow xVM

RBAC vs sudo HOWTO

problems reprobing iscsi devices with solaris 10

IPMP for Solaris Zones

All OpenSolaris flag days

Liveupgrade for idiots

Sigma DP-1 review

ratemynetworkdiagram

LSI MegaRAID SAS/Dell PERC5 driver for Solaris

dm-band block IO bandwidth controller

Sun open sources SAM-QFS

Dojo.storage - Google Gears workalike?

PerlCritic

PerlTidy

Tux droid

ooma.com - free phone service after you buy their device

Hacking defibrilators shockingly easy

Microsoft working with Eclipse.

Pentagon attack last June stole an "amazing amount" of data

Solaris and Solaris Cluster on HP ProLiant Servers

Apple Introduces new MacBook and MacBook Pro models

Sun leaks 6-core Xeon, Nehalem details

Xen and Solaris - a journal of sorts

How to save the world with ZFS and 12 USB sticks

Xvm: a summary of creation of various Xen domU

OpenSolaris b82 comes with CoolStack

Disk Encryption Cracked?

Dilber PHB on Virtualization Consultants

Dilbert PHB on Virtualizing

Burger Haiku Contest

Sun xVM Ops Center GA v1.0 tomorrow

KernelTrap on the 2.6.23 Xen merge

Infiniband explained.

IETF XMPP/SIMPLE Interworking Draft

PSYCed - IRC/XMPP server that gateways transparently between both

Wikipedia OTR

OTR - Off The Record, Homepage. IM Encryption.

SIPE - Pidgin plugin for SIP/SIMPLE with Microsoft LCS compatibility hacks

Price Waterhouse Cooper's Global Cable Map

Solaris Windows iSCSI speedup disabling NAGLE

qooxdoo.org

ConVirt

OpenSolaris Storage Developer Wish List

Nexenta Builder - build your own Nexenta based distribution

Microsoft to acquire SideKick maker Danger

Linux Kernel 2.6.23-2.6.24 vmsplice local root exploit

The evolution of Tech Company logos

Hypertable

Mindstorms NXT Rubiks Cube Solver

Cut four undersea cables, shame on you, cut a fifth, also shame on you

Koha - OpenSource Integrated Library System

Oracle's VM patch for Xen to allow 32bit/64bit domU save/restore/migrate with a 64bit hypervisor and a 32bit dom0.

2 girls, 1 cup: The show

Tue, 16 Jan 2007

Yesterday, someone stumbled into the #kvm channel and mentioned that VirtualBox has gone OpenSource.

After some frantic questions and listening to the #vbox channel, it became apparent that there are some benefits and limitations of VirtualBox worth noting.

VirtualBox can use Intel/VT or AMD-V/SVM if available, but does not require it. Much like VMWare, which take the same hybrid software/hardware approach to virtualization. For 32bit guests, this can be much faster than pure VT/SVM.

VirtualBox (herein referred to as VBox) is similar to VMWare workstation or VMWare server, in that it has a ring0 kernel driver for a linux host.

This ring0 requirement means that it is not compatible with a Xen paravirtualized domU (and that includes dom0).

VBox leverages QEMU heavily for software emulation of real-mode and other critical code sections, as well as for hardware emulation.

QEMU has a closed source kernel module, kqemu, and a somewhat alpha quality opensource equivalent, qvm86, that do the software code-scanning method of virtualization. They do not require or recognize VT/SVM.

VBox's primary competitor is the kvm project, which provides QEMU based VT/SVM guests. The downside of kvm, of course, is the requirement for VT/SVM support from your CPU. VirtualBox has no such limitation.

VBox only supports 32bit host kernels and 32bit guest images. There is no 64bit support for either running under a 64bit Linux host kernel, or running a 64bit guest OS. The website does mention that 64bit support is under active development, however.

VBox has yet another virtual bus of virtual devices, akin to Xen's paravirtualized XenBus devices (or Virtual Iron's NexBus). While hardware devices are available (PCNet32, etc) using QEMU hardware emulation, VBox also has some excellent video/network/disk drivers that eliminate the hardware chipset emulation overhead.

VMWare tried to make VMI a standard for paravirtualized bus devices. The Linux kernel developer community initially balked, but VMI support lives on in Rusty's paravirt-ops patches. Recently, Ingo has been making great strides with paravirtualized kvm support.

One oddity is that VBox uses .VDI files for its disk images. Not QEMU's QCOW format, not VMWare's VMDK format, and not RAW disk image format.

And for the n00bs that keep popping in and asking about 3d support. No, VBox doesn't proxy 3d. No, QEMU doesn't proxy 3d. Yes, you can use a 3d card with a Xen paravirtualized domain (NOT with an HVM domain).

The only virtualization platform that supports 3d for Windows guests, that I am aware of, is VMWare 5.0 and later which have a somewhat crashy "beta" DirectX 3d support. (Simply add "mks.enable3d = TRUE" to your .vmx file by hand, for more info try googling for "mks.enable3d").

Parallels has promised 3d guests for 4th quarter of this year. If they deliver it, I will be pleasantly suprised.

If you really need 3d gaming for Windows games on a non-Windows platform, consider Transgaming's Cedega product line. Yes, it is Wine. Yes, there is a 50% overhead for the emulation. No, you're not going to do much better without running windows bare iron.

Where does this leave me? In limbo, mostly. I have a 32bit farm of Xen hosts moving toward a 64bit Xen hosting platform at the moment. Xen appears to be crawling while other tech like kvm and virtualbox keep popping up to challenge it. Xen's "maturity" is only really a year at best with its HVM support (quite a lead in tech terms), I can see l-hype/kvm and virtualbox quickly overshadowing Xen in the near future.

Eventually, VMI/paravirt-ops is going to level the playing field with standardized guest device drivers, regardless of hosting platform. Until then, we continue to craft guests based on the virtualization platform under which they will be run.

Google
 
Web ian.blenke.com