Posted in hardware, linux on December 21st, 2006 3 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 [...]
Posted in linux on December 17th, 2006 1 Comment »
If you’ve had to do much performance tuning on a Linux system, you may have come across the oprofile system profiler. It may sound like a great piece of software, but it’s got a name for being difficult to use. In this article, I’m going to try to show that oprofile is decidedly non-scary, and [...]
Posted in hardware, linux on December 12th, 2006 9 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 [...]
