Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Wed, 30 Aug 2006 21:35:00 GMT
An oft-cited criticism of virtualisation is that 3D hardware acceleration doesn't work, preventing you from enjoying your hard-earnt game of Quake 3. Rumours abound that Parallels is developing it for its software, and that VMware is doing something in this area as well.
However, thanks to the Google SoC, the power of open-source itching, and the talented Andrés Lagar-Cavilla, Xen now has support for 3D acceleration as well! Check out the xen-gl web-page with screenshots, or just clone xen-gl.hg and get hacking!
Rather than getting down and dirty with foreign grant mappings, PCI pass-through and all that malarky, Andres adopted for the more pragmatic approach of packetising OpenGL using the Chromium project, and creating an x.org module to correctly position the resulting OpenGL. End result: hardware rendering in a guest domain, without requiring any extra hardware privileges. Awesome to the max!
Posted in research, xen | no comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:12:00 GMT
I noticed on the OCaml mailing list that Practical OCaml is due to be released in the US quite soon. Could this be the first real competition that Jon Harrop will face for his excellent but pricey Objective Caml for Scientists ?!
Things are heating up on the OCaml book front at last, and Jon has been getting some rave reviews of his book! We have a long-running joke about how much I hate the colour syntax highlighting he used in his book, and it amused me greatly to note that someone else in the comments for the rave review of his book also shared my heretical opinion, ha ha!
Incidentally, I just pushed the beginnings of an OCaml config file parsing library to the Melange source tree. The code in there is almost beginning to look useable...
Posted in hacking, books | 5 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Mon, 21 Aug 2006 17:08:00 GMT
I've been mentoring a few Xen projects as part of the Google Summer of Code program. One of the most fun is the OpenBSD/Xen porting effort which Christoph Egger has been hacking on. As of a few days ago, if you clone the Mercurial repository for the project, openbsd-xen-sys.hg, and build the kernel with with the i386 bsd.rd, you get the thrill of the following boot log:
[avsm@kremlin ~]$ sudo xm create -c openbsd
Using config file "/etc/xen/openbsd".
Started domain OpenBSD
[ using 187532 bytes of bsd ELF symbol table ]
Copyright (c) 1982, 1986, 1989, 1991, 1993
The Regents of the University of California. All rights reserved.
Copyright (c) 1995-2006 OpenBSD. All rights reserved. http://www.OpenBSD.org
OpenBSD 4.0-beta (RAMDISK_XENU) #0: Mon Aug 21 14:59:09 BST 2006
root@mortar.cl.cam.ac.uk:/usr/src/sys/arch/xen/compile/ RAMDISK_XENU
cpu0: Genuine Intel(R) CPU 3.00GHz ("GenuineIntel" 686-class) 3 GHz
cpu0: FPU,V86,DE,TSC,MSR,PAE,MCE,CX8,APIC,MCA,CMOV,
PAT,PSE36,CFLUSH,ACPI,MMX,SSE,SSE2,SS,HTT,TM,SBF,PNI,
EST,CNXT-ID
cpu0: EST: unknown system bus clock
real mem = 62554112 (61088K)
avail mem = 55603200 (54300K)
using 789 buffers containing 3231744 bytes (3156K) of memory
mainbus0 (root)
cpu0 at mainbus0
hypervisor0 at mainbus0
debug virtual interrupt using event channel 3
xenbus0 at hypervisor0: Xen Virtual Bus Interface
xencons0 at hypervisor0: Xen Virtual Console Driver
xencons0: console major 86, unit 0
xencons0: using event channel 2
npx0 at hypervisor0: using exception 16
Xen clock: using event channel 4
rd0: fixed, 3800 blocks
xenbus0: using event channel 1
xennet0 at xenbus0 id 0: Xen Virtual Network Interface
xennet0: MAC address 00:16:3e:05:83:11
xennet0: using event channel 5
root on rd0a
rootdev=0x1100 rrootdev=0x2f00 rawdev=0x2f02
erase ^?, werase ^W, kill ^U, intr ^C, status ^T
(I)nstall, (U)pgrade or (S)hell?
Christoph has done a superb job of porting the NetBSD/Xen code over to OpenBSD. There are still a few bugs to be worked out in the networking driver, the virtual block driver to finish up, and the rather more messy job of getting the user-land tools to run if we want an OpenBSD dom0. But this initial booting is fantastic to see!
Read more...
Posted in openbsd, xen | 10 comments | no trackbacks
Posted by Anil Madhavapeddy
Mon, 07 Aug 2006 21:32:00 GMT
A fellow passenger on a flight from New York to San Francisco was reading an interesting book called "The World is Flat: a brief history of the 21st century" (amazon). I'm on the same flight a few weeks later, so I picked up a copy to pass the time and have discovered one of the best books I've read in a long time!
The author, Thomas Friedman, works for the New York Times as their foreign affairs correspondent, and this book is packed full of references to interviews he has conducted with people ranging from the CEOs of multinational companies (e.g. the heads of Wipro and Infosys in India), all the way to small business owners in China and India.
His thesis is that the "world is flat" due to the convergence of factors ranging from the obvious: the fall of the Berlin Wall and the rise of personal computing, to the seemingly boring: supply chain management by Walmart. Where the book excels is its engaging presentation; rather than adoptic a polemic, argumentative style, Friedman instead quotes interviews with someone relevant to the field at hand. Books like this often annoy me with technical inaccuracies when they cover topics such as open-source software, but Friedman has great discussions with people such as Brian Behlendorf and Craig Mundie!
I'm still working my way through it (next hop: NYC to SFO), but the first half has been fantastic and has really changed my views (read: woken me up) to just how integral out-sourcing is to successfully conduct business today. The book, much like the content it presents, is studiously up-to-date as of 2006, and the author apparently plans to continue to keep it as a "presentist" publication which conveys a sense of the current state of the world and not the past or future.
Posted in politics, books | 2 comments | no trackbacks
