Wednesday, August 31, 2011

KeyKOS Nanokernel Architecture

http://www.cis.upenn.edu/~KeyKOS/NanoKernel/NanoKernel.html#RTFToC19

Wednesday, August 24, 2011

ReactOS based on the design of Windows XP/2003

ReactOS® is a free, modern operating system based on the design of Windows® XP/2003. Written completely from scratch, it aims to follow the Windows-NT® architecture designed by Microsoft from the hardware level right through to the application level. This is not a Linux based system, and shares none of the unix architecture.

http://www.reactos.org/en/index.html 
http://sourceforge.net/projects/reactos/

Longene ( Linux Unified Kernel )

Longene ( Linux Unified Kernel ) is an open source project sponsored by Insigma Co., Ltd a Chinese company.

Linux Unified Kernel claims to allow you to run Windows application native under Linux

It aims to implement a kernel module in Linux that provides a system-call and driver layer to allow the Windows applications to run on the Linux OS.

Linux Unified Kernel is named as Longene ( a sort of tea which is planted in Hangzhou China).


http://www.longene.org/en/index.php
http://sourceforge.net/projects/longene/
http://www.unifiedkernel.com/en/download.php

An English forum is available:
http://www.longene.org/forum/forum_en.php

http://www.osnews.com/story/21573/Linux_Unified_Kernel_Aims_to_Combine_Linux_NT_Kernel

FutureAlpha: Chinese Open Source OS.

SITE: http://www.woos.cn/

(Translated from Chinese)
FutureAlpha Introduction

FutureAlpha (next alpha) is a core operating system independent network for the future application of micro-kernel operating system, which the Internet as a software development and operating platform.

The software seamlessly extends from the client device to a huge Internet background, the operating system as a high-level resource management and sharing, diversity and flexibility of services to support the platform, supporting a variety of new network application model, the formation of new, open and sustainable growth of information systems.

Special areas of the current positioning, and ultimately to the general market. Its main features are: self-micro-kernel, compatible with mainstream WINDOWS / LINUX application, control security systems, distributed computing, transparent computing, lightweight, object-oriented design, a high degree of portability (currently supports X86 CPU (Intel, AMD), MIPS32, MIPS64 (Godson series CPU), ARM), a high degree of abstract-driven model and refining the application programming interface.

FutureAlpha operating system development was officially launched in 2005, a total to go through four stages: V1 (programs to recognize and experimental development),
V2 (experience),
V3 (for private),
V4 (for Universal)

The project has just entered V3 stage.

UniOS - Project Goals

http://tunes.org/~unios/projectgoals.html

UNIOS

http://translate.google.com/translate?js=n&prev=_t&hl=en&ie=UTF-8&layout=2&eotf=1&sl=auto&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.golem.de%2F1108%2F85776.html&act=url

Windows, Mac OS X and Linux goodbye: The Miracle of Lünen-OS is to make all other operating systems obsolete. Two weeks before the scheduled start of public beta could be Golem.de UNIOS view.

Friday, August 19, 2011

ROS: Personal Robotics and Open Source - Robotic Operating System

What is ROS?

ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for your robot. It provides the services you would expect from an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It also provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing, and running code across multiple computers.

http://www.ros.org/wiki/ROS/Introduction

Personal Robotics and Open Source: An Introduction to ROS

ROS is an open-source, meta-operating system for personal robotics. It provides services like an operating system, including hardware abstraction, low-level device control, implementation of commonly-used functionality, message-passing between processes, and package management. It also provides tools and libraries for obtaining, building, writing, and running code across multiple computers.
ROS provides a shared software platform to support robotics research and application development. For researchers, the common platform means that scientists can reproduce each others’ robotics experiments and directly build on previous results, leading to better scientific practice. For developers, it means that innovative robotics applications can be shared and used across many different robots. For hobbyists and hackers, it means that sophisticated capabilities, from autonomous navigation to object recognition, are within reach. ROS can be seen (depending on your perspective) as the Linux or the Android of robotics.
Together with Stanford University, Willow Garage launched ROS in 2007. Since that time, a significant and burgeoning ROS community has developed. Currently, there are approximately 2,000 ROS packages, nearly 80 publicly accessible repositories of ROS code, and over 50 robots using ROS, including mobile manipulators, quadrotors, cars, boats, space rovers, hobby platforms, and more.

Parrot virtual machine

This is something interesting I came across. I have been studing Virtual Machines and what's out there beside the Java JVM and the ancient Pcode from CPM days.  There is also LLVM, so now I just learned about Parrot when searching about Allison Randal who's name came up related to Ubuntu.



http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parrot_virtual_machine


Parrot is a register-based process virtual machine designed to run dynamic languages efficiently. It uses just-in-time compilation for speed to reduce the interpretation overhead. It is currently possible to compile Parrot assembly language and PIR (an intermediate language) to Parrot bytecode and execute it. Parrot is free and open source software.[2]

Parrot was started by the Perl community and is developed with help from the open source and free software communities.

There is a book on it
Parrot Developer's Guide

Parrot is a language-neutral virtual machine for dynamic languages such as Ruby, Python, PHP, and Perl. It hosts a powerful suite of compiler tools tailored to dynamic languages and a next generation regular expression engine. Its architecture is fundamentally different than virtual machines such as the JVM or CLR, with optimizations for dynamic languages, the use of registers instead of stacks, and pervasive continuations used for all flow control.

This book covers Parrot Intermediate Representation (PIR), Parrot's native low-level language. PIR is  fundamentally an assembly language, but it has some higher-level features such as operator syntax, syntactic sugar for subroutine and method calls, automatic register allocation, and more friendly conditional syntax. Parrot libraries -- including most of Parrot's compiler tools -- are often written in PIR. Even so, PIR is more rigid and "close to the machine" than higher-level languages, which makes it a good window into the inner workings of the virtual machine.

Linus Thinks Virtualization Is 'Evil'

From Slashdot:
http://linux.slashdot.org/story/11/08/19/1925243/Linus-Thinks-Virtualization-Is-Evil

"Linus said in an interview that he thinks virtualization is 'evil' because he prefers to deal with the real hardware. Hardware virtualization allows for better barriers between systems by running multiple OSes on the same hardware, but OS-level virtualization allows similar barriers without a hypervisor between the kernel and the hardware. Should we expect more focus on OS-level virtualization such as Linux-VServer, OpenVZ, and LXC?"


http://www.networkworld.com/community/node/77850
Torvalds says, "Virtualization is evil"

Despite a general dislike of the concept, Linux creator gives a guarded thumbs up to Xen while Kroah-Hartman praises KVM.

Ask the world's most famous kernel developer what he thinks of the virtualization wars going on the Linux community between KVM and Xen and you'll hear a condemnation (of a sort) of them both. "I'm not a virtualization kind of guy. I think virtualization is evil," Linus Torvalds told the crowd at LinuxCon on Wednesday during his keynote interview session with Greg Kroah-Hartman.
Virtualization takes Torvalds away from the hardware and that's not where he wants to go. "I built a kernel because I wanted to get my hands grubby with things like I/O ports."
Nevertheless, he did offer somewhat of a new vote of confidence toward Xen, a project that was formally the subject of much famous flaming on the kernel developer mail list. "I told them, 'Look at what you sent me and look at what KVM sent me and ask yourself why do I like the KVM people more than I like you,'" he explained. Xen caused its own messy bed by not working well with the Linux kernel team, kernel experts say. The distro makers were ticked that the Xen team didn't always keep up with the latest changes to the kernel, so supporting it in their downstream editions would mean they would have to take on the burden of updating it.
But, not content to hand Linux users neatly into the hands of Red Hat's KVM, which had long ago been accepted into the kernel, the Xen folks changed their ways. "Xen developers listened to the feedback and they are now in the mainline kernel," say Torvalds. "They started thinking about how they look to [the people not on their team]. They got it. I used to dread pull requests from the Xen people. Now I don't."
Acceptance of the source Xen code for Xen's Dom0 into the kernel was a milestone for the Xen.org community achieved in June.
So then, given the history, which one does Torvald's prefer? Well, obviously, neither, as he's a guy that likes making software work directly with hardware. When an attendee asked, he merely said, "Xen is a different mind set and has different HW constraints than KVM. We support choice so we do both."
However kernel driver guru Kroah-Hartman was less circumspect and spoke out in favor of KVM. "I do like KVM" he said, saying he thought its approach was cleaner and more elegant, praise the world has heard before for the hypervisor under Red Hat's dominion by the Linux kernel team. He also added, "This is not my corporate answer. My company has invested hugely in Xen." Kroah-Hartman works for SUSE, formally of Novell but recently acquired by Attachmate.
Jim Zemlin, executive director of The Linux Foundation, perhaps summed it up best. In his closing remarks he said, "For all you bloggers out there, I have your headline for you: `Linux Torvalds says that virtualizaiton is evil, world disagrees.'"


Additional Reading:

http://churchofbsd.blogspot.com/2011/08/xenorg-stefano-stabellini-developer.html
http://churchofbsd.blogspot.com/2011/08/xen-virtual-machines.html
http://churchofbsd.blogspot.com/2011/08/kvm-kernel-based-virtual-machine.html


Report: HP’S webOS Ran Twice as Fast on iPad

http://www.wired.com/gadgetlab/2011/08/webos-on-ipad

It certainly wasn’t poorly performing software that killed the TouchPad.
Sources at The Next Web reports that HP’s webOS team hacked an iPad 2 to run their software — and it ended up running over twice as fast on Apple’s tablet than on the TouchPad.
Even before the TouchPad tablet or Pre smartphone were officially released, the webOS developer team was so fed up with HP’s lackluster hardware that they “wanted them gone.”
HP rocked the tech world yesterday when it announced the company would no longer be producing webOS hardware, including the TouchPad tablet and Pre smartphones, after acquiring Palm last year for $1.2 billion. The webOS software could still be licensed to third-party manufacturers. HP CEO Leo Apotheker cited lack of traction in the marketplace as a major reason for abandoning the mobile operation.

Microsoft's new plans.



http://mobile.osnews.com/story.php/25080/Microsoft_Patent_Covers_Streaming_OS_Plans


http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/08/19/172222/Windows-8-To-Fight-Piracy-With-the-Cloud

"With the latest Windows 8 build (8064) that has been delivered to Intel, it's clear that the company is taking strides to make sure that its upcoming OS isn't quite so easy to pirate. For starters, the generic volume license keys that were so easily exploited during the early days of Windows 7 leaks will no longer be an option for pirates. Product keys also won't be shipped in the prodkey.txt file included in the build packages. Instead, installers will need to retrieve a unique key from a Microsoft web page. There's also a good possibility that the recently-surfaced fast booting patent could come into play as well. If Microsoft does indeed have designs on using a remote server to push OS code to systems at boot time, that code would be a very clever place to embed activation-related programming. Even if a crack was discovered, it would be neatly undone during a subsequent start-up sequence — similar to the way Microsoft's now-idle Windows Steady State could turn back the clock on an entire Windows installation after rebooting." Microsoft has also indirectly confirmed in a recent blog post that Windows 8 will make use of an app store.

Thursday, August 18, 2011

Userspace TCP Stack : TCPSpeaker element of the Click Modular Router project

Announcing the Release of a Userspace TCP Stack



At Mike Perry's request, I'd like to announce the recent availability of
a tunable, BSD-licensed Userspace TCP Stack. I'll just post my original 
email exchange from yesterday below, which includes all the details:

------------------------ 8<  ------------------------

Hi Mike,
I hope my TCP code may prove useful. Our code comes out of a research
project for enabling legacy TCP-speaking end-hosts to interface with
new, clean slate wireless mesh transport protocols. Our sources can be
obtained as part of the TCPSpeaker Element of the Click Modular Router
project:

git clone git://bowl.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/click.git
git checkout tcpspeaker

All TCP-specific code is contained in the two files:
elements/local/tcpspeaker.cc
elements/local/tcpspeaker.hh

To build the code as a click element (which I'm not certain may be
your desired use case)
./configure --disable-linuxmodule --enable-userlevel --enable-local&&
make

To get a high-level overview of our design, which may assist in your
retooling it to your needs, here's a video from the SyClick workshop
which gives a nice explanation:
http://www.syclick.ua.ac.be/content/multiflowdispatcher-and-tcpspeaker-video

A 3-page abstract:
http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/papers/LSMS-TCDSSS-10a.pdf
A (slightly longer) Thesis:
http://www.net.t-labs.tu-berlin.de/~dlevin/mthesis/main.pdf

This thesis contains a lot (possibly too much) documentation on the
TCPSpeaker Click Element. The implementation section may give some
useful insights. At the end in the Appendix, there are some tables
documenting the TCPSpeaker element handlers. Finally, if anyone wishes
to try running this within click, there are some example click
configurations given in the click repository under
conf/tcpspeaker-{avila,avila-baseline}.click

Fwd: Next week: BayLISA/LSPE Joint Meeting - Security Themes



---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: BayLISA <info@meetup.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 18, 2011 at 1:23 PM
Subject: Next week: BayLISA/LSPE Joint Meeting - Security Themes
To: john.sokol@gmail.com


Meetup Reminder
BayLISA
Meetup
BayLISA/LSPE Joint Meeting - Security Themes
will happen on Thursday, August 25, 2011
When: Where: RSVP:
Thursday, August 25, 2011
6:00 PM
Yahoo! Campus - Building C Cafeteria "URL"
701 First Avenue
Sunnyvale, CA 94089
Yes
No
Who's going:
19 Members
See all

BayLISA and
LSPE are proud to collaborate on a joint meeting this month on security themes.

Our headliners will be Aashish Sharma and Jay Krous of Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, who will speak on their research and analysis of SSH credentials stealing attacks. We are looking for some shorter talks to supplement this presentation; contact the organizers through the link to the left if you would like to give a ~15 minute security-related talk.

This month's meeting will be held in conjunction with LSPE's meeting on August 25, 2011, at 6pm. The location will be Yahoo! Building C at 701 1st Ave in Sunnyvale (1st Ave at Mathilda Ave, near Moffett Field and Weird Stuff).

More details on speakers and specific topics will be coming in the next week.


There will be no Third Thursday meeting this month.


Our meetings are usually scheduled for 7:30pm on the third Thursday of each month, LinkedIn HQ in Mountain View. However, this month's meeting is a special joint meeting at Yahoo.


For directions this month, point your map tool at:


701 1st Ave

Sunnyvale, CA


Or simply take 101/237 to Mathilda and exit away from downtown.


BayLISA includes system and network administrators across a range of skill levels. BayLISA meets to discuss topics of interest to system administrators and managers. The meetings are free and open to the public.


Recent topics have included OpenStack Nova, Dynamic Tracing and dtrace, ISC's BIND 10, new developments in LAN/top-of-rack networking, and cloud computing at Netflix.


We always welcome presentation topics and volunteer speakers. Use the "Contact us" link on this page to get in touch with BayLISA's directors.


Please rsvp here on Meetup to help us plan for attendance.

Learn more
You only have until August 25, 2011 4:00 PM to RSVP!

More Meetups from this group

Sep
15

7:30 PM

BayLISA Monthly General Meeting - All Welcome

LinkedIn

2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

Details for this meeting are still TBD. Check back for more details as they become available. Our meetings are scheduled for 7:30pm on the third Thursday of each month, LinkedIn HQ in Mountain View. Note that we are in a different building at… MORE

RSVP →
Oct
20

7:30 PM

BayLISA Monthly General Meeting - All Welcome

LinkedIn

2029 Stierlin Ct, Mountain View, CA 94043

Details for this meeting are still TBD. Check back for more details as they become available. Our meetings are scheduled for 7:30pm on the third Thursday of each month, LinkedIn HQ in Mountain View. Note that we are in a different building at… MORE

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Tuesday, August 16, 2011

Stable = Older

It's also simpler under the hood which is also important for Stability.

But it all depends on what your trying to do. GUI vs. Server. 
For Server I'd go with BSD.

For GUI I'd go with Windows,  Apple OS-X (BSD variant), maybe Android (haven't developed on it yet)
  X Windows just sucks.

For Embedded , I'd go with what ever the eval boards ship with. Usually Linux these days. (Certainly not PSOS or QNIX)

At this point I can compile the same code on all of these using GCC and run them equally well.  They are all Posix compliant. SDL run's on all of them.
Java also run on them. So does Flash, LLVM, TCL, PERL, RUBY, Python or what ever langue du jour.

Let's end the religious wars on OS's, it's about getting your work done. The OS is just a platform for the language your want your code to run on.

Hard Truths About HTML5

From Slashdot:

"Peter Wayner discusses a number of hard truths Web developers must accept in making the most of HTML5 — especially those who are looking to leverage HTML5 in hopes of unseating native apps. 'The truth is, despite its powerful capabilities, HTML5 isn't the solution for every problem. Its additional features are compelling and will help make Web apps formidable competitors for native apps, but security issues, limitations of local data storage, synchronization challenges, and politics should have us all scaling back our expectations for the spec.'"

Saturday, August 13, 2011

Patent Applications Hint Apple Wants To Eliminate Printer Drivers

From Slashdot: Patent Applications Hint Apple Wants To Eliminate Printer Drivers

"Apple has filed two patent applications that describe an approach as well as file formats and APIs to eliminate the printer driver as a requirement for users to access a printer and print documents. If the company has its way, there will be three ways to access a printer in the future: The first will be via a conventional software driver. The second will be via a cloud service and the third will be via a driverless access method that supports 'universal' printing from any type device."

Thursday, August 11, 2011

Javascript PC Emulator

http://bellard.org/jslinux/

Javascript PC Emulator - FAQ
Javascript PC Emulator - Technical Notes

PacketShader - GPU-accelerated Software Router

http://shader.kaist.edu/packetshader/

CLICK modular network routing software

http://comments.gmane.org/gmane.network.routing.click/7516

Open vSwitch

http://openvswitch.org/

Why Open vSwitch?

Hypervisors need the ability to bridge traffic between VMs and with the outside world. On Linux-based hypervisors, this used to mean using the built-in L2 switch (the Linux bridge), which is fast and reliable. So, it is reasonable to ask why Open vSwitch is used.

The answer is that Open vSwitch is targeted at multi-server virtualization deployments, a landscape for which the previous stack is not well suited. These environments are often characterized by highly dynamic end-points, the maintenance of logical abstractions, and (sometimes) integration with or offloading to special purpose switching hardware.

Fwd: Register Now: Software Patent Debate, 8/24

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: "Computer History Museum" <events@computerhistory.org>
Date: Aug 11, 2011 10:15 AM
Subject: Register Now: Software Patent Debate, 8/24
To: "sokol@dnull.com" <sokol@dnull.com>

CHM.ORG CALENDAR VISIT MEMBERSHIP EXHIBITS FOLLOW US:  FACEBOOK  TWITTER
 

Motion: Software Patents Encourage Innovation

Proponents of software patents argue that software deserves the protection of patents just as any other invention does. Software is simply a description of computer instructions that allow a processor to perform complex tasks. Particularly in today's knowledge economy, the value of software is growing and patents protect the investment of time, effort, and money made by companies and individual programmers.

Critics of software patents argue that they stifle innovation rather than promote it by cutting off the free flow of ideas needed to advance technology. Software consists of mathematical equations, which cannot and should not be patentable. Most software patents describe algorithms that are simple or obvious to a programmer of ordinary skill and thus do not deserve patent protection.....Read More

Bob Zeidman will be signing copies of his most recent book, The Software IP Detective Handbook, after today's debate. The book will be made available for purchase in the Museum store.

Bring your lunch and enjoy a lecture with CHM friends and family.
Lunch will be available for purchase in the Museum Cafe prior to the lecture.
The Museum will provide beverages and chips.

Event Details

When:
Wed. August 24, 2011
Noon: Program
(Free to Attend)

Where:
Computer History Museum
1401 N. Shoreline Blvd.
Mountain View, CA 94043
Directions

This event was made possible by

 

 

If you no longer wish to receive emails from the Computer History Museum please click here to unsubscribe

PC Designer Says PC "Going the Way of the Vacuum Tube" - Slashdot

http://slashdot.org/story/11/08/11/0339224/PC-Designer-Says-PC-Going-the-Way-of-the-Vacuum-Tube?utm_source=rss1.0&utm_medium=feed

Tuesday, August 09, 2011

PID without a PhD


On EETIMES:
PID without a PhD

Editor's Note: Tim Wescott's "PID without a PhD" was originally published Embedded Systems Programming in October 2000. The article became a huge hit over the years and was "repurposed" by other sites, such as EE Times India, and linked to by many sites, such as Wikipedia. We knew this was a popular article and it remained so up until it became unavailable when we redesigned our site in July 2010. The staff at Embedded.com is working diligently to restore all our old content and make never-before-posted content available soon.

Here is the full original PDF of the article "PID without a PhD."

Microsoft Demonstrates Practical Homomorphic Computing - Slashdot

http://it.slashdot.org/story/11/08/09/0159225/Microsoft-Demonstrates-Practical-Homomorphic-Computing

"Homomorphic computing makes it possible to compute with encrypted data and get an encrypted result, something that could make cloud services more secure. Such systems have so far been mathematical proofs, but researchers at Microsoft now say that stripped down versions able to only compute certain mathematical functions are efficient enough to be used today. They built prototype software capable of calculating statistical functions using encrypted data and say it could be used for processing medical data while protecting privacy."

 

Monday, August 08, 2011

OpenCL - The open standard for parallel programming of heterogeneous systems

OpenCL is the first open, royalty-free standard for cross-platform, parallel programming of modern processors found in personal computers, servers and handheld/embedded devices. OpenCL (Open Computing Language) greatly improves speed and responsiveness for a wide spectrum of applications in numerous market categories from gaming and entertainment to scientific and medical software.

http://www.khronos.org/opencl/
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/OpenCL

WebCL - Heterogeneous parallel computing in HTML5 web browsersThe WebCL working group is working to define a JavaScript binding to the Khronos OpenCL standard for heterogeneous parallel computing. WebCL will enable web applications to harness GPU and multi-core CPU parallel processing from within a Web browser, enabling significant acceleration of applications such as image and video processing and advanced physics for WebGL games. WebCL is being developed in close cooperation with the Web community and has the potential to extend the capabilities of HTML5 browsers to accelerate computationally intensive and rich visual computing applications.

http://www.khronos.org/webcl/

KVM: Kernel Based Virtual Machine

 Everytime I hear this I think,  KVM switch (with KVM being an abbreviation for keyboard, video & mouse)


KVM (for Kernel-based Virtual Machine) is a full virtualization solution for Linux on x86 hardware containing virtualization extensions (Intel VT or AMD-V). It consists of a loadable kernel module, kvm.ko, that provides the core virtualization infrastructure and a processor specific module, kvm-intel.ko or kvm-amd.ko. KVM also requires a modified QEMU although work is underway to get the required changes upstream.
Using KVM, one can run multiple virtual machines running unmodified Linux or Windows images. Each virtual machine has private virtualized hardware: a network card, disk, graphics adapter, etc.
The kernel component of KVM is included in mainline Linux, as of 2.6.20.

KVM is open source software.

Main site:  Kernel Based Virtual Machine 

Start Up Claims Immortality For Data With Stone Like Disc

http://hardware.slashdot.org/story/11/08/08/2222208/Start-Up-Claims-Immortality-For-Data-With-Stone-Like-Disc

This is something long overdue.  We don't have any recording media with a life span more then a few decades at best.

The horror stories of old films and magnetic tape recordings has been told over and over.

I personally experienced trying to recover data off 9 track tape and having the glue get gummy and the take stick to the recording head.

Even CD's and blue ray don't have much of a life span.

Any long term medium should be non-conductive, to protect against EMP.
UV resistant so not degrade in sun light,
Survive temperature extremes.
Be mechanically sturdy so it doesn't break
Resistant to long term water / moisture and microbial growth.
Resistant to long term exposure to low intensity radiation.  (natural background, and radon and other sources)



Plastics and other hydrocarbons like epoxy absorb moisture and break down with UV and microbial action.

Even Glass may possibly deform over 100's of years as it's a semi-liquid.
http://www.desy.de/user/projects/Physics/General/Glass/glass.html

This leaves only a few things that could work.

Silicon Carbide, Diamond and other hard crystals are probably the best bet.
Maybe graphene, nanotubes or other carbon forms.



Joyent, Cloud Software for Service Providers

http://www.joyentcloud.com/technology/

http://www.joyent.com/documents/Joyent-Cloud-Based-Application-Architectures-Using-Smart-Computing-White-Paper.pdf

http://www.joyentcloud.com/wp-content/uploads/2010/05/Joyent-Smart-Architecture-for-Cloud-Computing.pdf


http://www.joyent.com/documents/Joyent-SmartMachine-and-VirtualMachine-Data-Sheet.pdf


Joyent SmartOS uses Solaris under the hood,

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Joyent

Joyent is a cloud computing software and services company based in San Francisco, California, since 2004. Joyent provides application virtualization.
JoyentCloud, Joyent’s hosting business unit, offers Infrastructure as a Service (IaaS) and Platform as a Service (PaaS) for large enterprises including LinkedIn, Gilt Groupe, and Kabam. In March 2009, Joyent extended its business by licensing its Smart software to Dell.[1] Joyent is a supporter of open source projects including Node.js and Illumos. Employees of Joyent are referred to as “Joyeurs”.

LinuxCon North America August 17 - 19, 2011 Vancouver, Canada

August 17 - 19, 2011 · Hyatt Regency Vancouver · Vancouver, Canada

http://events.linuxfoundation.org/events/linuxcon

Silicon Sensing - Gyroscope Sensors and Inertial Systems Engineering Development and Manufacturing

http://www.siliconsensing.com/

The make gyroscopes.  HSC has a bunch surplus.  crs03-01s

ACCU Wednesday 'Code Simplicity: The Science of Software Development' Max Kanat-Alexander

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Walter Vannini


When:      Wednesday, August 10, 2011
Topic:     Code Simplicity: The Science of Software Development
Speaker:   Max Kanat-Alexander
Time:      6:30pm doors open
        7:00pm meeting begins
Where:     Symantec
        VCAFE building
        350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road)
        Mountain View, CA 94043
Map:       <http://tinyurl.com/334rv5>
Directions: VCAFE is accessible from the semicircular courtyard between Symantec buildings <http://tinyurl.com/2dccgc>
Cost:      Free
More Info: <http://www.accu-usa.org>

The topic of this meeting will be "the fundamental laws of software development", as described in Max's upcoming book "Code Simplicity". The book took many years to compile, and is currently planned to be published by O'Reilly Media in Q4 of 2011. This talk starts off with a discussion of the broad, general rules currently known in the field of software design, to give us a good base. Then we'll discuss the newly-discovered Laws of Software Design and how they can be used in practical software development, showing also how they underlie many of the currently-known best practices.

The hope of "Code Simplicity" is to change the world of software development, to take it from its current rudimentary, unsure state and elevate it to a level where we all as software engineers have a common base of ideas which we can use to understand, discuss, and handle complexity, design, implementation, maintenance, change, and all of the other broad aspects attendant to our software engineering lives.

Max Kanat-Alexander is the author of the forthcoming book "Code Simplicity: The Science of Software Development" to be published by O'Reilly in Q4 of 2011. He is also the Chief Architect of the Bugzilla Project, the author of fedorafaq.org, and a Software Engineer at YouTube.

Meetings are open to the public and are free of charge.

---------

The ACCU meets monthly. Meetings are always open to the public and are free of charge. To suggest topics and speakers please email Walter Vannini via walterv@gbbservices.com

Windows 8 Hyper-V and MinWin: A game changing strategy? | ITworld

http://www.itworld.com/virtualization/189289/windows-8-hyper-v-and-minwin-game-changing-strategy



http://www.osnews.com/story/25026/Windows_8_Hyper-v_and_MinWin_A_Game_Changing_Strategy_

 Microsoft seems to be "all in" with its virtualization strategy these days: back in June we heard word of a client-hypervisor (Hyper-V 3.0) built into Windows 8 and in mid-July, Hyper-V for the upcoming Windows Server 8 was publicly unveiled. And I've dug up evidence of a much bigger presence of MinWin in Microsoft's upcoming OS. So how is this fitting together? Is this the ultimate virtualization trio?


MinWin contains the bootloader, HAL (processor & chipset initialization, memory manager, etc), scheduler, most of the kernel infrastructure (sans most drivers, filesystems, etc) and some of the core Win32 subsystem upon which essential apps can be run.

To MinWin you can then configure an OS build by choosing which OS components you want to include from a catalog of items - NTFS, (ex)FAT, etc., TCP/IP & NETBIOS, SCSI/RAID, video, audio, printers, .NET, etc.

Windows Internals Book

MonaOS - Free Operating System

http://www.monaos.org/

Saturday, August 06, 2011

Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer


Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer Interview July 21, 2009 from xen_com_mgr on Vimeo.

--------------

Stefano talked at this last SVLUG meeting

Wednesday, Aug. 3rd, 2011 General Meeting
Stefano Stabellin Topic: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstream Efforts and Recent Developments 
Fwd: [svlug-announce] SVLUG Aug. 3nd meeting: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New Developments

His talk in was called Xen: Past - Present and Future.

He spoke about a new Device Driver Architecture, Where DOM0 and stub domains share memory pages with other VM's used for communications. This is called the XEN Bus


Advantages of using a VM
Small surface of attack
Isolation
Resilience

Specialized Algorythems such as the Schedualer

Type1 and Type2 Hypervisors.

Type1 is like XEN, and VMWare that run with a DOM0 or basically the OS that provides native driver support runs over the VM not under.

Type2 is Runs over a native OS such as Virtual Box, (VMWare also has a version to support this also)  , KVM

It was unknown what type Parallels Virtuoso was.

dom0, Primary OS that talks to real hardware and manages VM.
domU, Guest OS's that are run on the system. 



PV (Para Virtualization) is where a special OS or drivers for the OS are used to communication with VM aware drivers, rather then having to emulate native hardware.

Where
HVM (Hardware-assisted Virtual Machine).  Simulates the whole PC including PCI hardware.
This is slower and less efficient.



History
Xen was a research product at Cambridge .


PV (Para Virtualization) support went in the 2.6.26 (so fairly recent)
dom0 support in to 2.6.37
NetBack 2.6.39  network backend drivers
BlkBack 3.0.0    block backend drivers



To run a Type1 hypervisor dom0 the OS needs to support it, Fedora and Ubuntu had for a while but dropped it's support as too much to maintain. This is resolve with the inclusion in the main kernel branch.
Linux 3.0.0 Kernel has native support.


Book of Xen

Chapter 1: Xen: A High-Level Overview
Chapter 2: Getting Started
Chapter 3: Provisioning domUs
Chapter 4: Storage with Xen
Chapter 5: Networking
Chapter 6: domU Management: Tools and Frontends
Chapter 7: Hosting Untrusted Users Under Xen: Lessons from the Trenches
Chapter 8: Beyond Linux: Using Xen with Other Unix-like OSs
Chapter 9: Xen Migration
Chapter 10: Profiling and Benchmarking Under Xen
Chapter 11: Citrix XenServer: Xen for the Enterprise
Chapter 12: HVM: Beyond Paravirtualization
Chapter 13: Xen and Windows
Chapter 14: Tips
Chapter 15: Troubleshooting

Xen: Virtual Machines

QEMU: Generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

 

http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenIntro

Thursday, August 04, 2011

The Linux 20th Anniversary Picnic August 27, 2011

From: Scott M
"Webpage is at linuxpicnic.org, picnic is at  Sunnyvale Baylands Park. , near 237 iirc.  I think its like $5 a car to get in"

Life of a Patch

Android Open Source Project (AOSP)  : Life of a Patch


Well I don't know .. think I've seen better .. but don't want to spend the time to fix .. 
In general  the code standards at many places I worked demanded that the flow 
travels from  left to right and top to bottom ...  .. and feedback loops  are horizontal for 
left and right .. vertical on top to bottom ...   this works on multi page charts .. 
on a single page like the below link ..you can get away with unconventional formats
but not on a big one ... 

LP

Monday, August 01, 2011

BASH Programming : Introduction HOW-TO

BASH Programming - Introduction HOW-TO

SED, a stream editor

Sed can be one of the most powerful tools for manipulating text information. The problem is lack of documentation.

I found a good site that documents all of it's many cryptic features. 
http://www.delorie.com/gnu/docs/sed/sed_toc.htm
http://anaturb.net/sed.htm

QEMU: Generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.

QEMU is a generic and open source machine emulator and virtualizer.
When used as a machine emulator, QEMU can run OSes and programs made for one machine (e.g. an ARM board) on a different machine (e.g. your own PC). By using dynamic translation, it achieves very good performance.

When used as a virtualizer, QEMU achieves near native performances by executing the guest code directly on the host CPU. QEMU supports virtualization when executing under the Xen hypervisor or using the KVM kernel module in Linux. When using KVM, QEMU can virtualize x86, server and embedded PowerPC, and S390 guests.

The following OS are supported in user space emulation:
  • Linux (referred as qemu-linux-user)
  • Mac OS X/Darwin (referred as qemu-darwin-user)
  • BSD (referred as qemu-bsd-user)

QEMU can emulate many devices. 


http://wiki.qemu.org/Index.html

http://wiki.qemu.org/Manual

http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/QEMU

Xen: Virtual Machines

What is Xen Hypervisor?

The Xen hypervisor is a layer of software running directly on computer hardware replacing the operating system thereby allowing the computer hardware to run multiple guest operating systems concurrently. Support for x86, x86-64, Itanium, Power PC, and ARM processors allow the Xen hypervisor to run on a wide variety of computing devices and currently supports Linux, NetBSD,
FreeBSD, Solaris, Windows, and other common operating systems as guests running on the hypervisor.
The Xen.org community develops and maintains the Xen hypervisor as a free solution licensed under the GNU General Public License.

http://www.xen.org


http://www.xen.org/files/Marketing/WhatisXen.pdf

http://www.xen.org/community/xenhistory.html


Update: Notes from SVLUG Meeting  Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer

Fwd: [svlug-announce] SVLUG Aug. 3nd meeting: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New Developments

Update: Notes from SVLUG Meeting  Xen.org Stefano Stabellini Developer

---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Rick
Date: Mon, Aug 1, 2011 at 4:19 PM
Subject: [svlug-announce] SVLUG Aug. 3rd meeting: Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New Developments
To: svlug-announce@lists.svlug.org



WHEN:

  Wednesday, Aug. 3nd, 2011
  7pm-9pm


MAIN PRESENTATION

 TOPIC:
   Xen Support in the Linux Kernel: Upstreaming Efforts and New
   Developments

 PRESENTED BY:
   Stefano Stabellini,
   Senior Software Engineer, Citrix R&D

 TOPIC SUMMARY:
   Xen (http://www.xen.org/) reuses many externals of open source
   projects, Qemu (http://qemu.org/) and Linux in particular.  During
   the first years of existence, Xen accumulated a large number of changes
   to these external projects, but then struggled to upstream them.

   In the last couple of years, the Xen community has been trying to
   remove the dependencies on downstream modifications, and establish
   better relationships with other open source communities.  What is the
   current status of Xen in relation with other free software projects?

   At the same time, Xen development proceeded at a fast pace, and several
   new features were introduced; this talk will go through one in
   particular: PV on HVM support in the Linux kernel.  Traditionally,
   Linux has always run on Xen either as a pure PV guest or as a
   virtualization-unaware guest in an HVM domain.  Under the name "PV on
   HVM", work has been done to make Linux aware that is running on Xen,
   and enable as many PV interfaces as possible, even when running in an
   HVM container.

 ABOUT THE PRESENTER:
   Stefano Stabellini (http://www.stabellini.net/) is a Senior
   Software Engineer at Citrix R&D (formerly XenSource, Ltd.), working
   on the open source Xen Platform
   (http://www.citrix.com/English/ps2/products/feature.asp?contentID=1681747)
   team.  He has been working on Xen since 2007, focusing on several
   different projects, spanning from Qemu to the Linux kernel.  He
   currently maintains libxenlight
   (http://blog.xen.org/index.php/2009/11/09/libxenlight-released/),
   Xen support in Qemu, and PV on HVM
   (http://wiki.xensource.com/xenwiki/XenLinuxPVonHVMdrivers) in the
   Linux kernel.  Before joining Citrix, he was a researcher at the
   Institute for Human and Machine Cognition (http://www.ihmc.us/),
   working on mobile ad hoc networks.

LOCATION:

   Symantec
   VCAFE Facility
   350 Ellis Street (near E. Middlefield Road)
   Mountain View, CA 94043

   Directions on how to get there are listed at:

   http://www.svlug.org/directions/veritas.php

 We've tried our very best for these directions to be accurate.
 If you have any improvements to make, please let SVLUG's volunteers know!
 webmaster at svlug.org

POST-MEETING GATHERING:

 If you just can't get enough, a smaller group usually goes to a local
 restaurant/diner after the meeting:  Frankie, Johnnie & Luigi, Too,
 939 West El Camino Real between Shoreline and Castro, Mountain View.

We look forward to seeing you there!


_______________________________________________
svlug-announce mailing list

Fwd: The Big Shift to Cloud-based Security ; CIO Insight

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