Sun Studio 12 update 2

Sun^H^H^HSolaris Studio 12 update 2 has been released.

This native Solaris compiler suite has had a lot of care and attention paid to it recently. It has received many impressive updates & new features recently.

This latest update renames the product from Sun Studio to Oracle Solaris Studio.

Highlights include :
+ Improved performance and improved code generation
+ Improved support for newer CPUs
+ Better diagnostics
+ Improved support for OpenMP & Linux
+ Many improvements to Performance Analysis tools & dbx
+ Improvements to DLight

Excellent highlight for me was the improvements to dbxtool and the inclusion of the brand new Discover memory debugging tool. It appears to be similar in functionality to Valgrind, which will be a great help when debugging Solaris apps.

What's new guide
Solaris Studio page

KVM OpenSolaris

Although I deleted my old OpenSolaris VirtualBox VM, I thought I'd see if KVM could handle the last OpenSolaris 134 development release.
KVM worked work, it installed very well and runs fast. What impressed me the most was the 134 build itself. Everything was updated and better than the older 2008.05 release I was stuck using at work (My Xeon CPU would not boot the 2009.06 release, build 118 and above seem okay).
The Package Manager looks wonderful. I'm using it to install SunStudioExpress, to explore the new developer features.
I think that I will keep this VM around and reload Solaris 11 into it whenever that gets released.
I find that it is always useful to use compilers from different platforms to check the correctness of your code, and Sun Studio is a good compiler.

Migrating to KVM

I've begun the process of migrating to the KVM virtualisation technology. I did have some reservations about it initially, because I felt that we should not have to deal with full machine VMs running legacy OSs like Windows and instead new VM technology should be focusing on para-virtualising many copies of GNU/Linux.
But I have been trying out KVM with each new GNU/Linux distribution and finally it is getting good. The speed and technology have always been good but the GUI side was lacking, but it has greatly improved.

On my Fedora 13 x64 system, KVM is very fast at creating brand new VMs. But what to do with my VMs that I have built up on VirtualBox ?

So far I've migrated 3 VMs using a command like this :

$ cd $HOME/.VirtualBox/VDI
$ qemu-img convert CentOS4_32-bit.vdi -O qcow2 CentOS4.qcow2

This will convert the VDI file into qcow2 for use in KVM. I'm sure that they are better ways to do this, but it worked for me for 3 VMs so far.

I miss a few features from VirtualBox, mostly the save current state which saves the VM and closes it all down, like a hibernate. I miss the graphical performance of VirtualBox which is fast. The Shared Folder support is also great.

But KVM is developing rapidly. The performance is great and much faster than any other VM product that I have tried. I can't wait to see how KVM develops in the future.

OpenSolaris is killed off

I have been sad to see the demise of Sun. They were one of my favourite companies and were the leading innovators of UNIX. They gave so much to the industry and redefined it in so many ways.

With the new of the demise of OpenSolaris, I have deleted my OpenSolaris partition at work and deleted my VirtualBox VMs of OpenSolaris 2009.06 x64. It looks like they will have a Solaris 11 Express in the future but I'm not sure if I will try that.

The Register: OpenSolaris killed off

Oracle's attitude seems to have turn sour with news like this :
BBC News: Oracle sue Google
Will they be suing MS next for .NET ? which is just a Windows-specific copy of Java and the JVM.
How safe are MySQL, OpenOffice and VirtualBox?

Sun Studio Express 6/10 released

A refresh to the excellent Sun Studio suite has been released.

The last full release (Sun Studio 12 Update 1) included a new DBX frontend called dbxtool, which was excellent.
This refresh includes an interesting new addition. It a new memory debugger called Discover.
They have also included brand new code coverage tools.
Also included is better optimisation support for new CPUs such as the Xeon 7500 range and the newer SPARC processors.
Performance analyser has been improved and the IDE is upgraded to NetBean 6.8 level.

Sun Studio download link at developers.sun.com
Video link

Previous Sun Studio 12 Update 1 included:

* DLight: runtime profiling using DLight, which unifies application and system profiling using DTrace technology on Solaris platforms.
* OpenMP 3.0 support, in the compiler and performance tools.
* Performance Analyzer: MPI Application Profiling
* Thread Analyzer: Detecting Multithreaded Programming Errors

Screencasts available here

Fedora 13 released

Fedora 13 64-bit was released. It looks to be another excellent GNU/Linux release following in the footsteps of the very successful and stable Fedora 12.

Fedora website
Fedora 13 Release Notes
Fedora Downloads

DistroWatch: Fedora
DistroWatch: Fedora 13 - interview and first look
TheRegister: Fedora 13 review
Rock It : What's new in Fedora 13

Firefox for Windows starts 64-bit transition

CNET: Firefox for Windows starts 64-bit transition

Building a new powerful but efficient PC ... Part 2

The Power Supply Unit (PSU)

I wanted to find a cheap but very good PSU for my PC building exercise. I had already decided that it had to be both silent and 80% efficient at a minimum. The 80plus program details devices that are at least 80% efficient, so look out for the 80PLUS badge.

The 80plus website is an excellent way to check out the specifications of a PSU that you are interested in.

http://www.80plus.org/manu/psu/psu_join.aspx

By browsing this list I was able to find a 500W PSU that was 85% efficient at 50% load, which is good enough for me as it was inexpensive. I opted for a Coolermaster 500W Silent Pro M.

VIA unveils Nano E-Series 64-bit CPUs

VIA Unveils Nano E-Series at ESC 2010, Readies Embedded Industry for Next-Generation 64-bit Computing

Via: Nano E-Series

PCMag: Via unveils 64-bit Nano E-Series CPUs
Via 64-bit processors

Building a new powerful but efficient PC

I've decided to build a new PC. The last time I did that was about 10 years ago maybe, when I built a dual CPU Pentium III with 512MB of RAM and 2x 20GB hard drives. Obviously, things have moved on a lot since then. I normally use a variety of CPU architectures and manufacturers at work, and work have settle for Intel CPU for desktop workstations. At home, for desktop PCs, my last two were HP AMD 64-bit Athlon machines. First the Athlon 64, then the Athlon X2.

I have been searching around for about 2 months online, checking out configurations and prices. But I struggled to find the exact specification that I wanted and struggled to find GNU/Linux only machines. It is probably my fault for being fussy, because I wanted efficiency to play a huge part. Why buy a CPU eating 125 watts of power when a 45W or 65W will be almost as quick?

I decided that I was either going for a really low power 45-65W machine, like the Dell Inspiron Zino HD, i.e. a small case and lower power but packing a punch with lots of RAM. Or, I was going to make a really powerful workstation that still did not require a local power station to run it. Well I opted for the powerful workstation because I wanted to make it last a while and run lots of virtualised guests.

After not finding what I wanted in the pre-built PC world, I decided to build one myself.

So far, I've only bought 3 parts, I'll buy the rest over the next weeks/months.

CPU: AMD Phenom II 905e
Motherboard: Gigabyte 785G chipset MA785GT-UD3H
and a nice case.

The reasoning behind the CPU, is that it is very powerful & has great virtualisation features, having 4 cores will future proof me a little. It is a very lower power consuming chip, it requires 65W, vs. the 125W of the Black editions and the fastest i7 from Intel. It has lots of cache also.

The 785G chipset seems very fast and has that great feature of having fast on-board graphics. I'll probably just stick with on-board graphics for a while. The board has some great eco-friendly features to keep it cool and running reliably. There is a slightly newer chipset but I thought this one was great and implemented well and should be very compatible with Linux.

Next step might be choosing a good quality PSU, hard drives or SSD, RAM, etc. etc.