Being Virtualised

I noticed that RedHat released their 5.4 update and it includes a lot of new features.

h-online: RedHat Enterprise 5.4
Info.Week: Redhat virt

They seem to be really going to KVM instead of Xen, and now I'm starting to wonder if that is the right move. The more I use VirtualBox and KVM, the more I want to stop using legacy OSs like Windows. The main reason for VirtualBox, VMware and KVM, at the moment, is to do full hardware virtualisation. But we don't want to run and use Windows forever, the future is GNU/Linux.
Redhat already has a great solution for para-virtualisation, where you can easily runs hundreds of VMs with little slow down, and it's called Xen.

So just when I start to think that the days of VirtualBox, VMware and KVM are limited, it seems that others are saying that they are the future. Why? Do the believe that we'll be needing those legacy OS's forever? I'd rather be able to run a few Linux distributions at once without needed full HW-virt.

Just a thought.

OpenSolaris 64-bit kernel 118 boots again

I'm happy again after trying out the OpenSolaris build 118 kernel from www.genunix.org

It now boots up successfully on my Quad-core Xeon E5410 processor. OpenSolaris 2008.05 was the last version that booted up okay, the subsequent versions would just automatically reboot just after loading the kernel. I tried different kernel debugging options but they all resulted in it just rebooting before giving any useful information.

But after grabbing "OpenSolaris preview 2010.02, based on build 118" from genunix.org, it boots successfully. So I will be very happy to use the 2010.02 release once it becomes available.

genunix.org
http://www.genunix.org/

News round up: 64-bit Chrome appears?

CNET: Google's 64-bit Chrome starts emerging--on Linux
http://news.cnet.com/8301-30685_3-10314452-264.html

What's 64-bit on Snow Leopard?
http://www.pcworld.com/businesscenter/article/170478/whats_64bit_on_snow_leopard.html

FreeBSD 8.0 Beta 2 64-bit (AMD64)
http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-stable/2009-July/051181.html

Ubuntu 8.04.3 LTS 64-bit release
https://lists.ubuntu.com/archives/ubuntu-announce/2009-July/000124.html

NetBSD 5.0.1 64-bit release
http://www.netbsd.org/releases/formal-5/NetBSD-5.0.1.html

Power7 CPU news

Slashdot: Power7
http://it.slashdot.org/story/09/07/22/1828249/POWER7-To-Ship-In-First-Half-of-2010

TheRegister: IBM lifts the veil on Power7
http://www.theregister.co.uk/2009/07/21/ibm_power7_details/

zdnet: IBM outlines Power7 plans
http://news.zdnet.co.uk/hardware/0,1000000091,39689359,00.htm

Easy upgrade path to Power7
http://www.itbusinessedge.com/cm/blogs/cole/an-easy-path-to-the-power7/?cs=34310

Going from distrib to distrib

I ended up using Ubuntu 8.04 64-bit as my work desktop for possibly 10 months. I chose this after failing to get newer OpenSolaris release to boot on my quad-Xeon CPU (latest 104 Solaris kernel still does not boot).

Ubuntu is excellent, I'm quite used to Debian and Ubuntu at home, so setting them up at work was easy. Showing off apt-get to people really impressed them. I did have issues with being stuck on openoffice v2, but I could cope with that. I did want to try out the KVM virtualisation technology, but that was quite lacking in Ubuntu; it never started up properly or worked.

I wanted to switch to a distribution that was more KVM friendly so I decided to wipe Ubuntu and go with CentOS 5.3. But waiting for 5.3 took too long for me, so I went with Fedora 10 64-bit :-).
I've used all the distros at some time, so Fedora was not new to me. It is an excellent distro.
I had only a couple of issues with it :
1) nvidia driver problems - resolved by adding another repository source
2) constant yum issues - the PackageKit would hang and lockup all the time
3) yum is nowhere near as good as apt

But I've been very happy with Fedora 64-bit. It has everything I need in a corporate development environment. The other developers using Windows are constantly surprised at Fedora features.

Since then, I have upgraded to Fedora 11, which is even better. But I would not recommend the upgrade, you should format and install the new Fedora 11 fresh. I've had lots of issues with clashing packages and dependency problems, but I have resolved them all. PackageKit now works.
and I've been experimenting with KVM vs. VirtualBox 3.0.2.

Sun Studio 12 Update 1 released

A new compiler refresh from Sun. It's the Sun Studio 12 Update 1.
For me, it fixes an optimisation bug that prevented me using Solaris on x64. so I'm very impressed so far.
This update changes a lot from the original Studio 12, original Studio 12 was v5.9, Update 1 has a new 5.10 version number.
dbxtool is new and the IDE has been updated also.

Features
Sun Studio 12 Update 1 Download
Support Matrix

Open64 compiler suite

x86 Open64 Compiler Suite v4.2.2 is now available.

It appears to be a complete & open compiler suite for x86 32-bit & 64-bit machines.
It looks very feature rich. The downloads are only for GNU/Linux.

Open64 compiler suite

New Linux released 2.6.29

The kernel called Linux has reached version 2.6.29.
It contains a huge amount of new development and interesting features.

KernelNewbies: 2.6.29
IBM developerWorks: Linux kernel advances

Manually enabling the new 64-bit Java plugin

I found that I had to do the following to enable the new Java 6 Update 12 64-bit plugin, which was just released as part of Java 6 Update 12.

$ cd /usr/lib/firefox-3.0.5/plugins
$ sudo ln -s /opt/jdk1.6.0_12/jre/lib/amd64/libnpjp2.so .

Then restarting Firefox & doing "about:plugins" correctly showed the Java plugin as loaded up.

4 new 64-bit releases

A quick round-up of 4 recent 64-bit OS releases:

Ubuntu 8.10

Ubuntu.com 8.10 desktop
OSNews: Ubuntu 8.10
Register: Intrepid Ibex

OpenSUSE 11.1

OpenSUSE News: 11.1 released
OpenSUSE 230 new features
Phoronix: OpenSUSE 11.1 released

Fedora 10

Fedora 10 Release Notes
SlashDot: Fedora 10 'Cambridge' released
DistroWatch: Fedora 10
arstechnica: Fedora 10 new features

FreeBSD 7.1

FreeBSD 7.1 Release Notes
SlashDot: FreeBSD 7.1 released
OSNews: FreeBSD 7.1