Mhackintosh blog

I won’t talk about Mac or IT world, this time just a little side-note about my family.

This summer I came to France, Begium (and Neerland too), to see our family, and moreover discover the next generation, that is already promising, let me introduce them…

First there was the Christening of my nephews Mathieu & Thibaud (5 years old both), that Christophe & France adopted 2 years ago in Haïti. They are 5 years old and packed of positive energy (and some malice too!).

Then there’s Louison (3 years old) with her mother Elizabeth, that I didn’t had a chance to meet in France, she has the eyes of her mother and the kind smile of her father. A little shy at first, but playful and lovely!

The last one is Quentin (3 month), brother of Louison, that I almost ever see sleeping or drinking milk! Seems able to sleep while all family is having a dinner and speaking loud, laughing out very loud, and enjoying it!

This was a big trip for us, from Montreal to Paris, then 2500km (1600 miles) of road-trip, including Amsterdam, Namur, Lyon, and back to Paris! We would like to see our family, discover the new generation, and celebrate our parents!

Since the last update of the graphic drivers on my MacBook Pro, I didn’t have no more access to CUDA (nVidia GPGPU tools and drivers), and each time my laptop start, the CUDA System Preference display this message:

CUDA is now disabled on my MacBook Pro!

Sorry Apple, but you screwed my development environment!

PS: As stated, this is the newest graphic drivers from Apple but they are not compatible with actual CUDA Drivers!

LaptopMag.com have tested Flah Player 10.1 on the new Droid 2 (Android 2.2 OS), and the conclusion is straightforward: “Steve Jobs was right”.

Go read it’s interesting, and written by someone that thought at first that Adobe Flash Player might succeed on Android platform…

There’s just one simple way to add TRIM on SSD organized on RAID. RAID-1, RAID-0 and RAID-10 are simple to handle and TRIM command could be easily dispatched to SSD.

On RAID-5 & RAID-6, it’s much more complicated and in fact not manageable from a controller point-of-view without having insight into filesystem structures. That is normally disabled as RAID (hardware or software) are on a different layer than FileSystem handlers, on the existing major OS.

The simplest way is just to implement 0-write detection on SSD, and treat it as TRIM information:

• To TRIM data, send a 0-block (either 512bytes or a multiple)
• SSD detect this as “trimmed” (unused and flag it)
• on read, trimmed blocks just send back 0’s, as it was written. To avoid confusion between TIMMING and a block filled with 0’s
• On RAID-5 or RAID-6 (or any-else), TRIMMED data will be treated as 0’s and thus drive status will be maintained on RAID crc calculation
• When reconstructing a failed drive, each trimmed sector will result on 0’s (due to CRC calculation) and then considered trimmed AGAIN on the new drive

No more no less… The only difference is that the filesystem handler have to send a block with 0’s to the drive controller, and SSD drive firmware updated to handle it as a TRIM command.

It will limit BIG deletion to approximately 300MB/s or 600MB/s depending on SATA version, but it’s not a limitation on real life use, albeit being able to use any RAID, wether hardware or software, transparently, to TRIM data on drives, will be a huge step forward for SSD in enterprise world

Singularity OS is a Microsoft Research Project, a very interesting project: it’s a microkernel OS based on the idea of running everything on managed code (JIT compiled code) including drivers and everything else than the micro-kernel!

The main idea is to get ride of CPU-based memory protection and IO protection, everything is running without any protection, the protection itself is based on static code analysis and dynamic checking. For this to work, any code must in form of an intermediate representation (often incorrectly called bytecode), that is analysed at load, interpreted or compiled on-the-fly with security checks.

The interesting thing is that code is “naturally” protected from buffer overrun, or any kind of attack, as any code is suspect by default, and on the other way switching from one thread to the other is lightning fast as no context change must be done. A very interesting project, that might be bases for future Microsoft or Open-Source OS.

SingularityRelease 2.0 is available here, with it’s source-code.