Fukuzawa Yukichi, the Japanese neoteric educationist and ideologist, expressed the idea that the scholar should work his best to push forward civilization, to concentrate his studies on important issues dosed related to social development, to be brave enough to doubt the accepted, and to be able to suffer anonymousness.
BX1200 Special Version, which is dedicated for PowerOn Tech. is ready today. I have noticed Shan Xiaoyu he could download the firmware now. As expected, a piece of BX1200 will be sent to PowerOn tomorrow morning. There will also a related training about this product in the next day.
I’ve received two Tyan platforms(Code:5372) from Zhang Rongqi, and these two machines are used for our next NAS Gateway products, which will integrate IPMI to instead of early APC fence devices. However, we have to research and study more about IPMI applications.
There are two boards seemed suitable for next generate NAS product. In fact, both of these products should be installed in SuperMicro 5120F-280 or 5130F-430 chassis. Their processors must support 64bit operation system as my yesterday description, and the DDR2 memory is considered better than FBD memory in our application. And the last one, maybe the most important point, is when externel IPMI card is inserted in its identified slot, the IPMI management interface is quite different between the above two board. One shares with on-board ethernet ports, and the other has dedicated RJ45 port. Gavin suggested the first one is better because it will make system architecture more simply.
The disk driver adapter functions of the Super I/O chip includes a floopy disk, driver controller that is compatible with industry standard 820777763 data separator write pre-compensation circuity decode logic data rate selection, a driver interface contrl logic and interrrupt and DMA logic. The Super I/O supports one PC-Compatible printer port(SSP), Bi-Directional Print Port(BPP), Enhanced Paralled Port(EPP), provides functions that comply with ACPI, which includes support of legacy and ACPI management.
When I check the information about disks via BX1200 Web GUI, I find that all SATA disks’ vendor is marked as “ATA”, while SAS disks’ vendor is “Seagate”(We use Seagate disks on that BX1200 platform). It is considered to be accepted in current version.
SSP: Serial SCSI Protocol
STP: Serial ATA Tunnel Protocol
Some famous storage vendors and its NAS products:
EMC: Celerra NS series
IBM: NAS Gateway 500
Sun: Storage Tek 5320
Bakbone: Netvault(it is also used in Plasmon’s SNAZ) for backup and recovery.
ADIC: Tape devices, an American company
FalconStor: Tape devices, and corporate with EMC
MWC: Mirror Write Consistency, when transfer data to remote host, and at the same time it also need to be written to local disk. This locate writing operation only be done after get the confirmation from remote host.
EM64T, Intel Extended Memory 64bit Technology, is extension of 32bit system. This technology makes the OS support up to 16TB memory by adding bit-width for both CPU and memory, while 32bit only supports up to 4GB.
Today’s working is to estimate how much benifit we can get from application 64bit system if upgrade BA880 and all its components.
What does 64bit system mean to developers?By using 64bit platform, the developers can reach better performance when run their programs. Not only this way could encourage the developers to create more powerful applications, but also enable these applications more flexible to adapt in various environments. And the programers even do not need to upgrade their old knowledge if they want to develop in new 64bit platforms.
Larger memory accessing location and 64bit registers provide higher performance on 64bit system. Here, I compare 32bit system and 64bit. As we known, 32bit system’s limit is 4GB memory usage. If there’s a program which is required 3GB memory resource, then it seems the left 1GB(maximum) has to be allocated to OS. Obviously, OS will be slower. The networking server and database server would ofen encouter this problem. And at that time, this 3GB program must need some specical operating to internal code. For example, Physical Addressing Extension, PAE and Address Windowing Extension, AWE, enable 32bit application’s API to access 2GB or higher than 3GB memory space. However, these above special operation have to need more maintenance and resources, even some potential problems.
64bit platform can fix these problems very well. Less code can greatly improve the whole performance. The local bit OS also get benifit from added memory spaces. The all cache, buffer and handler become larger for general applications, and the system could be more stable and reliable. Larger cache and buffer can provide faster data accessing. and support more collateral users.
Register is the fastest memory style which OS can provide. The registers create and keep the results of CPU operating and other computings. 32bit x86 CPU normally has 8 registers, while 64bit x64 processor has 16 registers. There are 128 float-registers 120 general registers in Itanium platform.
As summary, when allocate more memory resource, the performance of register and system can reach higher level they would have never getten in former 32bit environment. 64bit LInux can support file as large as 4EB(2**63).
BX1200 will be released soon except for testing report. The testing engineer has confirmed that the validation is passed, and they will complete the report. Poweron’s Zhang Jianbing told me that Samba, NTP and Http must be required. I need him to confirm some technoical details.
USB3.0, connectors and receptacles will be deeper than the current one, the third major connector of the serial bus standard is set to deliver date transfer speeds of around 4.7Gbps, ten times today’s 480Mbps limit.
Complete writing the step-by-step user guide for BX1200 guide. During the writing, I find some texts are not correct, which are still including NAS880 strings in some tips when mouse is over them.
We have already deployed several virtual machines on 226, and now I want to migrate this virtual servers to new ESX system. After reading some hints found in Internet, mount the Windows(226) share to ESX mount point and then import the files. The first three times I failed to mount the samba share because there is firewall existing on ESX system. When turn off firewall, the mount operation would be succeed.
I have to provide some user-end documents about NAS component, which is considered annoy job. Is that my duty? I don’t think so, I am a developing engineer, not a pure assistant, even who has a good hearing title: Department Interface. When I review the past years, I did not improve myself greatly either in technology or general communication. Even feel very tired sometimes. Pang Rangsheng said my face looked badly at this night. I am worry about my health. I must take good care of my mother, and I can not repeat my father’s way.
To make up for lack of natural talent by hard work.
This afternoon, Gavin told me something about integrating poweron’s software, which is called “pvg” and developed on Fedora5/6. It is used for video monitoring. Shan Xiaoyu and Xi Zhaoxu visited poweron, and later poweron agreed to give their program(binary format) to us for testing. We only need to run the script in the exacted directory. Zhufeng had installed it successfully on CentOS4.4. While in current BX1200 environment, it said that the glib version is too slow to run the program. We fixed this issue by upgrating the kernel from 2.6.21-7 to 2.6.22.15(stable), however, we do not estimated the effection to other components of BX1200, for example, Samba and NFS. The first successful running would create a license key that need to be re-certificated by poweron. Huang Pengcheng sent the first key file to poweron and later got the new key file, while in today testing, it seemed the received file can not be used. I have collectted all relevant information and send feedback to PowerOn.
PowerOn is still worry about how to update their video programs if integrate in our close BX1200. Gavin said we can provide a general interface for uploading as upgrate files in BX1200(Web/http upload).
Till the end of January, I will focus on this testing. The goal we want to reach is estimating whether integrate pvg or not. If integrate it, we also need to estimate the working load.