Thursday, January 15, 2009

No VMX on RHEL4

And here's another mind blower: If you have a machine with a VMX enabled CPU, you boot it to RHEL5, and cat /proc/cpuinfo, everything works as expected. If you boot that same machine to RHEL4, it masks the VMX flag.

Actually, what happens is that /proc is created at boot time. The cpuinfo file is created and formatted, based up on the kernels interpretation. Sine VMX wans't around in RHEL4 days, it doesn't know how to translate the bits and bytes of the flag.

VMX Disabled in BIOS

I was trying to build out a full-virt VM, and was disappointed to find get an error:
Can't do --hvm on this system: HVM guest is not supported by your CPU or enabled in your BIOS
I knew that wasn't right: vmx showed up in the cpu flags.

Then I learned a new trick. When we cat /proc/cpuinfo, we are looking straight into the CPU. But... That doesn't mean a feature isn't disabled either in the BIOS or on the motherboard. To see what the system's capabilities, we have to go to /sys. In this case we need to:
$ cat /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities
xen-3.0-x86_32p
If vmx was working, we'd see a list of hvm capabilites. (Remember: vmx and svm are proprietary, hvm is open.)

On the HP I was working on, virtualization was disabled in the BIOS. That seemed strange, until a co-worker found the setting in the BIOS security settings. Oh, that makes sense-- VM's are a security risk. Either that or it cuts into the number of physical machines HP sells.

Now that it is enabled in BIOS, we get:
$ cat /sys/hypervisor/properties/capabilities
xen-3.0-x86_32p hvm-3.0-x86_32 hvm-3.0-x86_32p
Molto bueno.

In all fairness, it's not only an HP issue. I found that Compaq is disabling this also.

What's that you say? They are the same company? Nooooo.

Tuesday, January 13, 2009

Gabbiano Chianti

For no real reason, I assumed this would be a great wine. Honestly, it was the fact that the label said "Established 1124". It's not like this bottle was 900 years old.

But I digress. This was one of those wines that was completely drinkable wines that was good but not great. If it were just a few dollars less, it would have earned a better review. Easy 5 of 10.

Chateau Du Jaunay Muscadet Sevre et Maine

Long name. This one was the last from my French white expedition. I didn't have very high expectations for this, but this was excellent. I think the trick was that this was a white loire wine as opposed to a the white burgandies that got such bad reviews. This was smooth, light, crisp, dare I say a 7 of 10. And now, I'll have to get several Loires.

Feudo Arancio Pinot Nior

Traditionally, we would think of Pinot Nior as French, but this one is from Sicilia. Wow. What a great aroma. Good stuff. A good 6 of 10.

Monday, January 12, 2009

Who put that there?

Somebody left a bunch of concrete baricades laying on the sidewalk in DC. Wow, its a good thing they aren't in the street! I can't image why they're here... It's not like anything special is happening.

Top 10 Evil Computers

From Wired, Top 10 Evil Computers. I'm suprised Number 10 wasn't Number 1, but then I guess I'm old. So old, in fact, that my favorite is Number 3. (Cool YouTube link.)

Sunday, January 04, 2009

Effects of Automobiles on the Atmosphere

Meteorologists stated that the US climate model changed after the grounding of commercial aircraft as a result of 9/11. Once the aircraft were back in the air, the model changed back. Now, NASA has evidence as to the degree of impact that automobiles are having an effect on the atmosphere.

For two months prior to the summer olympics, the Chinese government banned cars from Beiging, The effect was a 50% reduction in toxic output. Why only 50%? They still ran buses, trains, and cargo trucks.

64-bit Flash 10 on Fedora 10

I just tried to load the Flash Player for F10 x64, with no luck. Several pages lead me down the wrong paths, including downloading a TAR, and directly importing the SO. I found a post by Naresh Kumar who said to drop the SO in:
~/mozilla/plugins
rather than
/usr/lib/mozilla/plugins
Now it works.