Tag Archives: freebsd

The idiomatic ZFS on Linux quickstart cheat-sheet

Posted on by Mahmoud Al-Qudsi
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I’m a FreeBSD guy that has had a long, serious, and very much monogamous relationship with ZFS. I experimented with Solaris 9 to learn about ZFS, adopted OpenSolaris (2008?) back in the “aughts” for my first ZFS server, transitioned my installations over to OpenIndiana after Oracle bought Sun Microsystems out, and then at some point switched to FreeBSD, which I found to be a better designed OS once I had moved everything headless and was ready to completely bid the need for a desktop environment goodbye. But every once in a while I have to stand up a ZFS installation on Ubuntu, and then I spend a little too much time trying to remember how to do ZFS things that FreeBSD makes easy out-of-the-box. After doing that one time too many, I decided to put down my Linux-specific notes in a post for others (and myself) to reference in the future.

A fully functional ZFS setup following ZFS best practices and Linux/Ubuntu idiomatic approaches

This guide will focus mainly on the Linux sysadmin side of things; note that basic knowledge and understanding of ZFS concepts and principles is assumed, but I’ll do my best to provide a succinct summary of what we’re doing and why we’re doing it at each point.

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OS X Snow Leopard to Use ULE Scheduler?

Posted on by NeoSmart Technologies
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snow-leopard

Ever since Steve Jobs first unveiled the next version of OS X, dubbed “Snow Leopard,” the internet has been abuzz with excitement and wondering about the supposed “evolutionary” qualities of OS X 10.6. One of the most-hyped improvements is the promised revamp of the SMP capabilities of OS X, with a “breakthrough” in SMP performance.

The codename for the technology behind the SMP improvements in OS X Snow Leopard has been named “Grand Central,” which Apple describes best:

“Grand Central,” a new set of technologies built into Snow Leopard, brings unrivaled support for multicore systems to Mac OS X. More cores, not faster clock speeds, drive performance increases in today’s processors. Grand Central takes full advantage by making all of Mac OS X multicore aware and optimizing it for allocating tasks across multiple cores and processors. Grand Central also makes it much easier for developers to create programs that squeeze every last drop of power from multicore systems.

Our guess is that these SMP “breakthroughs” are going to be delivered in two blows:

  1. Improvements to the OS X kernel intended to boost multi-threading & multi-tasking performance and better-distribute the loads across multiple CPU cores more intelligently.
  2. Provide an SDK (perhaps as improvements to XCode) that allows developers to more-easily write multi-threaded code, handle forking, and provide load-balancing features on a per-core basis.

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