Today was my last working day of the year, as I’ve accumulated some ridiculous amount of time off that needs to be taken.
Before I disappeared for three weeks, I wanted to get something finished that I’ve been working on for a while. I got close too.
The development tree of x86info (ie, git or snapshots) now has a nifty new feature where after parsing all the processors it finds, it determines how they’re connected, and prints out what it thinks the topology looks like.

So where 1.25 used to print out garbage like..

APIC ID: 0x1 Package: 0 Core: 0 SMT ID 1


The new code prints out something much more readable.

Summary:
This system has 1 dual-core processor with hyperthreading (2 threads per core) running at an estimated 2.95GHz
Total processor threads: 4


I’ve thrown it at several different kinds of processor topologies (single/dual/quad core), with and without hyperthreading, and it seems to do the right thing in all cases. Currently this code is Intel only. It may do the right thing on other vendors in some situations, but there are definitly cases where it doesn’t.

I’ll tackle the other vendors in the new year. If you find any Intel systems where it doesn’t print out the right thing, drop me an email with x86info -a –debug. (Don’t email me non-Intel ones, unless it does something really nasty like segfault).

Though as I’m on vacation, it’ll probably be the new year before I fix it up, unless I get bored.
When the new year comes and I’ve added the other vendor support, I’ll roll out a 1.26 release with this and whatever else I have queued up.

Happy holidays.

The kernel rpm package creates an initramfs file that gets dropped in /boot at install time. Creation of this file is the responsibility of dracut (or mkinitrd in older releases), called from the kernels %post script. Because we want removal of a kernel to also remove its associated initrd file (or else /boot would fill up), we used to list the initramfs file in rpms database as a %ghost file owned by the kernel.

For a long time, this hasn’t been a problem. Now that dracut creates more feature-heavy initramfs files, people were noticing that they were running out of space in /boot during the installation of the kernel rpm. People were asking “why doesn’t rpm check for sufficient diskspace before it tries to install ?” Well, it does. The problem is that for %ghost files, it has no way of knowing how big they are going to be.

So for Fedora 12, we ended up with an ugly hack. Instead of listing the file as a ghost, we create a 20MB empty file, owned by the kernel, which gets overwritten during %post by dracut with the real initramfs.

The big problem with this, is that it destroys the possibility for deltarpms to work. (It also guarantees that signature verification using rpm’s database will fail)

Something better needs to happen, but at this stage, I’m not entirely sure what that will be.

Many of my colleagues and lots of Fedora community folks will be heading to the frozen wastelandlovely city of Toronto next weekend for Fudcon.
To reiterate what I’ve said in email to a number of people: I won’t be joining them.

This year has been hellish for sorting out immigration details. In April, I needed a VISA renewal. Then there was a passport renewal. Because my passport was expiring, my VISA only ran until the length of the passport. So now I need another new one for my new passport. As part of the renewal process, I’m not allowed to leave the US. (Well, I could, but I might not be allowed back in).

In other news: I’m warming to the idea that the internet be switched off whenever there are public holidays.

I did a make prep of every package in the devel/ branch of Fedora CVS again.
The last time I did this (a year or so ago) it took up 80G of disk space. Today, it takes up 100G.

That’s a lot of code. Some of it even does what it’s supposed to.

Two years ago, when the Kindle was launched, I wrote that I probably wasn’t going to get one. Since then, I’ve warmed slightly to the idea of getting one.

What’s changed ? For one, my reading habits. I’m reading a lot more these days, and digital representations of those books take up less space, and are easier to travel with. One thing that might tip me over the edge to buy one though is that today Amazon announced they added a native pdf reader. I spend a lot of time staring at processor datasheets etc, and having something to hand that I can refer to without having to alt-tab away from my editor would be really nice.

That 85% battery life improvement is interesting too. I’m curious what was responsible for such a large saving.

Lazyweb, help me out.
I use mutt to read multiple mail accounts. Using alternates, I have it rigged so that when I reply to someone it sets my From: to the same as the address that they sent the mail To: Straight-forward stuff.

What I’d like to do next is set my .signature based upon the same rule.
I thought that this can be done easily enough with send-hooks like..
send-hook mutt- 'set signature=~/.signature1; my_hdr From: Dave Jones <emailaddress1>'
send-hook mutt- 'set signature=~/.signature2; my_hdr From: Dave Jones <emailaddress2>'

But that just seems to make it pick signature1 regardless of any header.

I googled a while, but turned up dead ends. profiles look interesting, but I’d rather not have to swap between things manually. Likewise, it looks possible to do it on a per-folder basis, but I want this to work with =mbox where all accounts land unfiltered.

Anyone set up something similar ?

I’ve not seen google wave yet, but here are my impressions based upon reactions from those who have.

Phase 1: HEY WHO HAS A GOOGLE WAVE INVITE THEY CAN GIVE ME?
This begging phase increases in popularity as more people actually get on the site.

Phase 2: THIS IS COOL, BUT WHAT THE HELL DO I DO WITH THIS ?
Turns out that the “I have something you don’t” novelty wears off quickly when people realise they didn’t actually need it.

Phase 3: HEY WHO ELSE IS ON GOOGLE WAVE ?
Belief that others may be able to enlighten them, and get them out of phase 2.

Phase 4: HEY THIS IS PRETTY USELESS.
Followed by neglect and forgetting they even have an account.

I’ve yet to see anyone praising google wave, but I’ve seen a lot of people go quickly through the above phases. I’m sure there are some people reading this through planet.*.com using it. Is it really “all that” ? Or is this google app going to be the next orkut ? (Remember when everyone thought that was the future? Ah, 2003 I miss you).

(This post isn’t actually me in phase 1. I couldn’t care less, and will probably skip straight to phase 4 when it goes public).

Despite having been around for seven years now, I still see a common misconception surrounding hyper-threading. People look at /proc/cpuinfo, see ‘ht’ in the flags line, and think “hey, I don’t have hyper-threading, /proc/cpuinfo is wrong!”.

But this isn’t the case. The ‘ht’ flag doesn’t signify the presence of hyper-threading or not. It signifies the presence of the ability to say yes or no as to whether the processor has any siblings. Basically “If I call this cpuid function, can I trust the results?”. This cpuid function is present in all intel processors since the Pentium 4.

So seeing a cpu with ‘ht’ in the flags, but no siblings is perfectly normal, and has been for all this time, but some people just don’t seem to get it.

First off, thanks to everyone who commented on my last post, or sent email expressing concern etc. Much appreciated. Though it did make me feel like I was in an episode of house, with the number of diagnosis’s I got from everyone who had had something similar, or known someone, or known a doctor etc.

So I had my head scanned last friday, and got the results today. It showed up nothing of concern. (Which shot down the majority of the suggestions I got from people, Dr House would not be impressed with you). While a clear report in some ways was a relief as it ruled out so many things, in other ways it was annoying because I still didn’t know for sure what has been going on with the headaches over the last month.

The current theory is that I’m suffering from cluster headaches. The symptoms sure do sound familiar. (Right down to the cute graphic, though mine is the right eyeball mostly). So I got a prescription today for some naproxen and imitrex. The latter reminded me why high-deductable insurance is a bad idea. $149 for a months worth. Suck.

Hopefully they will at least make the pain manageable. How long I’ll have to take them for is currently unknown.