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On my Ubuntu 8.04 machine I run a Windows virtual machine to allow me to use Adobe Lightroom for image editing.  I primarily use Sun xVM VirtualBox for this, thanks to the great price (free)

Until a few days ago I hadn’t realised that VirtualBox does not currently have SMP support, which I believed may explain why I was getting particularly bad performance inside the VM.  As a result I decided to try VMware Workstation, which does have SMP support

The result was actually worse… but I changed a couple of other variables too (big ones, like installing Windows Vista instead of XP).  Instead of jumping straight back to VirtualBox+XP I decided I’d have a look at what was actually going on

It turns out that this wasn’t going to be as easy as I’d hoped… io profiling in Linux is limited to say the least… beyond top for the iowait value and iostat, you can’t really see what’s going on

Just as I was beginning to despair I decided to see what Linux had to match Brendan Gregg’s excellent iotop DTrace script and it turns out there is a Python equivalent that uses experimental new io accounting available in Linux kernel 2.6.20 and above

The Linux iotop (which will be available in the Ubuntu 8.10 repos) did allow me to determine which threads were reading/writing to disk.  The net result is that I now know that both vmware-vmx and smbd were making heavy use of my home disk, most likely due to Lightroom building 1:1 previews for all of the images in my catalog

Thanks to some very clever individuals, Linux is slowly getting some of the features that Solaris has had for some time.  But wouldn’t it just be easier to port DTrace to Linux?

A couple of weeks Xiaoxiao was back in the UK for a very short trip.  Her visit coincided with Quentin sailing into Liverpool after 12 months at sea; I think he was more than a little surprised to see her standing in Albert Dock

Apart from seeing Quentin in, we spent another day in Liverpool, enjoyed stunning Metropolitan Cathedral as well as Liverpool Cathedral, not to mention trips to Williamson’s tunnels and those funny iron blokes stood in the sea

On the way back we enjoyed a film at Manchester AMC and our Indian restaurant of choice, Punjab along the curry mile.  Amazingly at least one of the waiters still remembers me from my regular visit almost three years ago.  Not bad going, if you ask me

Xiaoxiao is back at work in China now and after a week back at work I’m also slipping into the usual routine.  Last week my boss conducted my annual review, which I’m happy to say was very positive.  In the (hopefully not too distant) future I’m going to be getting a little more involved with the kernel “community”, with the possibility of being able to tag two to four weeks onto the end of my next trip to China working in one of the Chinese Sun offices

The first update in what must be well over a month… the biggest change in my life has been at work (I’m sorry to say).

As part of Sun’s drive to maintain profitability they have begun outsourcing some of the more basic work to partner engineers in Poland.  This has both pros and cons:

The plus side is that I no longer have to deal with some of the more mundane problems like disk swaps, memory DIMM replacements and so on.  It also means that, as Sun made a profit, I got a bonus.  It wasn’t much to write home about though… my quarterly bonus was calculated as 128% of 0.8% of my base salary (don’t ask), except in my case, they worked it out pro-rata for the number of months I’d been working.  In the end I took home a whopping £67 (pre-tax) this month(!)

The downsides are that Poland get their hands on some calls before we do… in the longrun this can cause more work for us.  As well as this, Sun had to let go a number of employees.  Fortunately the large majority of those let go put themselves forward for voluntary redundancy, so I like to think it worked out well for most involved.

Guillemont Park, the main campus for Europe and the Middle East (EMEA), now has a desk:engineer ratio that is looking a little underwhelming.  During the last two weeks most of us have moved desks; instead of being spread out over two sides of the building, we’re now all on one side, and I believe there may be plans underway to move engineers from another building to the now vacated side.  This is all rumour though, so who knows what will happen.

I’m happy with my desk relocation; it’s obviously not great to leave behind people who I’ve been working closely with, but the benefit to me is that I’m now sat in an OS/kernel/software community.  Over the coming months I’m trying to move into a more software role, although I will still be expected to handle other types of calls as they come in.

Furthermore, I am no longer in a team that deals exclusively with a large telecommunications company based in the UK… I now support this company, as well as a number of other important Sun customers, including investment banks, telcos and so on.  I am a member of the so-called ‘elite’ team.  (it refers to the customers, not the engineers!)

With some team members leaving, there was cast-off kit going round and somehow I’ve managed to upgrade myself from a single 19” CRT with Sun Ray to a dual-headed 19” flat panel Sun Ray config.  In terms of desktop real-estate, this mirrors my home setup, which is handy.

Hope everybody is having a good December… don’t forget to fire up xsnow!