JDPFu.com 2024

We know intuitively that desktops are faster than laptops – well, most of us know that, but how much faster? I’ve written that video transcoding is 2-3x faster on a desktop than a laptop. Here’s another example where the laptop is slower than a common desktop. You should be able to reproduce this yourself.

Just got a new laptop yesterday, but I didn’t like the way that the 500GB HDD is partitioned.

• Unknown (50MB)
• RECOVERY (18GB)
• WIN7 (whatever remained of the 500GB – over 400+GB)

Only a noob would want that partitioning because they simply don’t know any better. Why do manufacturers still do this? Ah – because it is easy. Sorry for the dumb question.

I want:

• Unknown (50MB)
• RECOVERY (10GB – it actually only uses less than 8GB – resize)
• WIN7 (60GB for apps and the OS – resize + move)
• Data (size determined by my backup disk … I’m guessing about 250GB) Much of it will be encrypted, since this is where my VMs are placed.
• Scratch area for local disk backups or snapshots of VMs or …. unimportant temp data.

Ah, if it were only that simple. Below I’ll discuss the methods used to shrink / resize disk partitions and re-align the data so reduce wasted areas on the disk.

For the last few months, X/Windows has locked up without warning on one of my fastest systems (Core i5). This is very unusual. I’ve run Linux systems for over 17 years and X has never been this bad. Never. About every 3 years X/Windows would lockup, but it has happened at least every 4 days for the last 2 months. Killing the Xorg process doesn’t work. That X process is using 100% of a core for multiple hours. It never recovers. The GUI is locked, but remote access from other systems works as do the background processes. Still, X can’t be killed, only a remote reboot brings the X-GUI back.

I don’t use Gnome or KDE. I’m running LXDE on Ubuntu Server x64 !0.04 LTS. It is patched weekly.

It sure would be nice if Ubuntu had not disabled the cntl-alt-backspace keystroke to kill the X-Server, wouldn’t it?

setxkbmap -option terminate:ctrl_alt_bksp 

The FLOSS Weekly podcast did an entire episode on VirtualBox recently. There were some interesting comments in the podcast from the VBox team.

The team believes they are the closest to native for both network and storage virtualization. They recommended a number of specific NICs and how to connect to storage that does not disagree with my Improve VirtualBox Performance by almost 50% article. That was good to hear.

They talked about:

1. Oracle’s commitment to VirtualBox
2. Virtualization Overview (why, features, security, virtualized hardware, etc)
   1. Most interesting to me was that VBox supports OpenGL 2.x – that means XBMC should run in a vbox VM.
3. Differences between the OSE and PEUL licenses – what is contained in just the PEUL?
4. vboxmanage and how 3rd party folks have written some nice tools
5. Teleportation (V-Motion like) that does not require identical
6. Page-Fusion – shared memory across guest OSes (this was new to me). The intent is to support hundreds of client VMs per server.
7. Mac virtualization challenges – it works, but only on Mac hardware due to Apple DRM in hardware checks.

Anyway, find the VirtualBox specific podcast here.
A link to the show notes

By the way, if you are a dentist, FLOSS Weekly has nothing to do with teeth. FLOSS is *F*ree *L*ibre *O*pen *S*ource *S*oftware.

This Cyberciti.biz article explains settings and techniques to increase the default RAID re-build performance from 4k to 51k in his example. The key settings were

1. Increase the speed limit max by adding dev.raid.speed_limit_max = 500000 to /etc/sysctl.conf
2. Enable bitmaps during the rebuild and disable them after
   1. sudo mdadm —grow —bitmap=internal /dev/md0
   2. sudo mdadm —grow —bitmap=none /dev/md0

I’ve been slightly disappointed with overall VirtualBox performance and decided to see what I could do to make things faster. For me, there are 3 elements to the performance issue. CPU, Disk and Network I/O. At this point, I only have possible solutions for two of the three areas.

My server is running Ubuntu Server x64 10.04 with VirtualBox 3.1.6 OSE directly from the Ubuntu repository. Below, I’ll describe how to improve both disk and network I/O performance. I think these suggestions will apply to other versions and MS-Windows hosts too.

About 100 people attended Outerz0ne Con yesterday in south Atlanta (near the airport). This was my first hacker conference ever though I have attended DC404 and other industry meetings. It appeared that many people had a really good time without attending many of the talks. Below I’ll provide my impressions and key things learned from some of the more technical talks. The last talk contained extremely helpful information for anyone running a web site.