Posted in hardware, linux on June 20th, 2007 No Comments »
I’ve been running test releases of Fedora 7, and lately the final
release, for a number of months on my fairly new Lenovo Thinkpad X60.
Here’s a brief summary of my experiences.
I’ve been using Fedora since 0.92 (Taroon), and while I’ve generally
been happy with it, F7 is not exactly a model of stability or
sleekness. Here’s a [...]
Posted in hardware, software on February 22nd, 2007 18 Comments »
I spent a while this evening reading through the documentation for the
beta release of NVIDIA’s
CUDA GPGPU system. My
motivation for this was that nvcc, the CUDA compiler, is based on a
code drop of the EkoPath
compiler, which I’ve worked on intermittently over the past few years.
The programming
model that these GPUs enforce is incredibly
complex. It’s more [...]
Posted in hardware on December 22nd, 2006 No Comments »
I’ve had a Sony Ericsson Z520a phone for a little under a year now, and as it’s still widely available through cellular carriers, I thought I’d write up my experiences with it.
I’m writing in part as a reaction to the weakness of phone review web sites, which tend to publish reviews from people who’ve had [...]
Posted in hardware, software on December 22nd, 2006 No Comments »
Jeremy and Muli remind me that x86-class CPUs refill a missed TLB entry in hardware. That’s what I get for rambling at midnight!
On these CPUs, the hardware walks the page tables directly when a miss occurs. The operating system still gets involved during context switches, to keep the page tables and TLB consistent; and it [...]
Posted in hardware, linux on December 21st, 2006 2 Comments »
In an earlier post, I briefly discussed the oprofile system profiler. I was going somewhere with that; here’s another step along the path.
Modern CPUs that use virtual memory have to be able to turn virtual addresses into physical addresses efficiently. While a userspace process operates on virtual addresses, accessing any part of the memory hierarchy [...]
Posted in hardware, linux on December 12th, 2006 8 Comments »
If you’re using a fairly modern laptop with an Intel chipset, the chances are that it has an Intel ICH7 I/O controller hub:
$ lspci | grep -i ide
00:1f.2 IDE interface: Intel Corporation 82801GBM/GHM (ICH7 Family) Serial ATA Storage Controller IDE (rev 01)
This usually means that your internal hard disk and CD-ROM/DVD drive (if you have [...]
Posted in hardware, software on October 18th, 2006 21 Comments »
Since 2003, I’d been using a Thinkpad X31 for much of my work; it was the best laptop I’d ever owned, and was really the only one I used heavily over a long period of time. It had an irresistible combination of small size, light weight, good performance (for its time), and excellent support [...]
Posted in hardware on September 7th, 2006 1 Comment »
I read in Bill Bumgarner’s blog that Dell has released a new model in its XPS line, the M2010. It’s not somethhing one could plausibly refer to as a laptop, due to its weight of 18.3lbs (8.3kg!) and 20“ screen.
Being a curious sort, and owning the M2010’s tiny cousin, the M1210 (the weight of [...]
Posted in hardware on February 22nd, 2005 No Comments »
I should have known better, but when I was incarnating the current noisy boat anchor that sits on my desk at home, I put a Hitachi hard disk in it. Not specifically one of the notorious IBM-era eat-your-data models, but something much more recent.
It made it to about six months of age before developing a [...]
Posted in hardware on November 16th, 2004 No Comments »
[From a Reuters story about some new Dell hardware.]
“Frankly, we shot ahead of the goose,” Golden said.