1.6TB Solid State Disks - BitMicro

BitMicro announced a new solid state disk, an "E-Disk Altima"

• Capacity 16GB - 1.6TB
• 4Gb FC
• Sampling Q1-2008
• Shipping volume Q2-2008
• 230MB/s, 55,000 I/O (I think this is comparable to other solid state disks)

Company news release, November 12th, 2007
Company news release, November 13th 2007 (Supercomputing, Reno, Nevada)

Hitachi jumps on the "Hypervisor in our firmware" bandwagon

It seems like the trend continues. Here's an article about Hitachi's offering of their firmware based hypervisor on the Xeon platform.

“ASIC coupled with embedded firmware”.

“Other attempts to embed virtualization within a server don't do so in hardware. In September, XenSource Inc. announced an embedded virtualization platform called XenExpress that integrates into servers via flash or on the hard disk. Similarly, VMware's ESX Server 3i fits on 32 MB of flash memory.”

“Virtage can partition physical server resources by building multiple isolated logical partitions (up to 16 partitions per server module) capable of running independently and supporting independent operating environments on each logical partition. It also provides a secure environment for each virtual machine and fault isolation through hardware boundaries.”

“BladeSymphony's SMP interconnect backplane supports two-socket Itanium processor blades that can be scaled up and/or out for up to two eight-socket (or 16-way) servers in a single chassis or eight two-socket (or four-way) servers.”

Hitachi blades virtualize without VMware

Reason for EFI boot?

Is this one of the killer apps for the EFI boot?

Today (with the Legacy BIOS) - you can only create an up to a 2TB partition. While this sounds like a fairly large partition size, think of the size of the storage devices on our desktops. Drives of 1/2 TB are commonplace. The storage demand in the datacenter is far greater. Seems that there is support in Linux for the GUID Partition Tables (GPT).

Blog - Linux Creating a Partition Size Larger than 2TB
FYI - GUID partition table
Microsoft Article - How Basic Disks and Volumes Work

Phoenix BOIS Hypervisor

Several sources discuss a Hypervisor offering from Phoenix Technologies:

1. Phoenix - Investor Presentation
2. EEtimes Article - Phoenix Rolls Environment for PC Apps
3. Computerworld - Is the move encroaching on Microsoft?
3. Blog - The Battle for the Hypervisor Heats Up
4. Blog - BIOS Maker Reinvents Itself as Virtualization Platform Vendor
5. WSJ Article - Making Laptops Work Better

A related, and possibly competing (?) project is called "Blue Pill". This is based on the research done by Joanna Rutkowska of the Invisible Things.

I'm not sure if Phoenix has looked into the copyright or trademark issues with respect to name HyperCore. A company called Plurality is developing a CPU architecture called "Hypercore Processor".

Windows Vista SP1 - Feautre White Paper

From the Windows Blog Website (Link)

Quality improvements including all previously released updates, which address reliability, security, and performance

Improvements to the administration experience, including BitLocker^TM Drive Encryption (BDE)

Support for emerging hardware and standards, such as an Extensible Firmware Interface (EFI) and an Extended File Allocation Table (exFAT).

AMD Manuals, Dev Guides

AMD's collection of the programmers manuals, developer guides, etc.

http://developer.amd.com/devguides.jsp

Intel Processor Manuals

All of the Intel Manuals in one place:

Intel® 64 and IA-32 Architectures Software Developer's Manuals

• TLBs, Paging-Structure Caches, and Their Invalidation
• Volume 1: Basic Architecture
• Volume 2A, 2B : Instruction Set Reference
• Volume 3A, 3B: System Programming Guide
• Optimization Reference Manual

One Man's Thoughts on EFI

This article has some interesting perspective on why a move to EFI is good thing.

You can skip the first four paragraphs about LEGO and a futuristic village.

D-EFI-nitely Maybe

EFI Webcast Insysde SW and Intel

" ... will be leading a tutorial webcast in which Intel will be co-presenting."

"... explores BIOS development challenges in embedded systems and how “The Framework” helps overcome those challenges

When: 6/14/2007 02:00 PM EST
Where: Link to the webcast

Link to the news release

New search engines ... or are they?

Interesting article in today's WSJ: "Search For Better Ways to Search". The article describes how the big search engine companies (Google, Yahoo, Ask.com and Microsoft) have deployed new search engine technologies, without tarnishing their names with possible acceptance issues or bugs.

• Google: SearchMash.com. The big feature they are testing is a coexistence of multiple searches on the same page: photo, blog, videos and wikipedia.
• Yahoo: Alltheweb.com.
• Ask.com: AskX.com
  

And, the most fun, from Microsoft: MsDewey.com. This the most fun to check out. Ms. Dewey will entertain you while you are searching.

OS Courses From Berkley

UC Berkley has some courses online. They offer a video feed and have some material that students use in the classroom.

CS 162 Operating Systems and Systems Programming (Fall 2006)

All of 2007 Courses. Semester has only started, so not much posted yet, but you can click on "Other Semesters" in the top right hand corner to see previous lectures.


- Dima