Published an article in Linux For you

You can see the abstract below

Developers Introducing Kernel Samepage Merging The motivation of KSM comes from the observation that on a large machine running several virtual machines (potentially running the same OS), there are a number of duplicate pages, each consuming a page of memory in the hypervisor.

The URL for the magazine is http://lfymag.com/currentissue.asp?id=13

Go rush and get the January 2010 copy, comments, feedback, criticism always appreciated!

FOSS.IN 2009 was great

I am delinquent in reporting about my FOSS.IN experience this year. Nevertheless, better late than never! My summary goes, the good, the awesome, the excellent and the let-downs. For the photo stream check out "foss.in/2009" tag on flickr

The let-downs

1. There were very good talks, I spoke as well (see http://foss.in/2009/schedules/talkdetailspub.php?talkid=15), but I was surprised to see people who had never contributed code, presenting, even though that is something that FOSS.IN was trying to move away from.
2. Atul stepped down as the organizer or key-organizer of FOSS.IN. We've had some interesting discussions on the mailing list, I'll certainly miss those
3. Stalls - the stalls from Nokia and some of the student stalls were awesome, I was hoping to see some key innovative work happening
4. Goody bag - I did not get my goody bag, I asked early and I was told to come at the end, but I was told they ran out :( I missed out on the mug I admire soooooo much
5. FOSS.IN almost seeming like FOSS.DE (we need a stronger rotation policy :), just kidding on this one)

The good

1. I loved the spirit of FOSS.IN
2. Loved the environment and speaking to the volunteers
3. Pulseaudio, I typically and still to some extent don't like Pulseaudio, but the technology and the architecture I learnt from the learned, seem very impressive
4. The hobby electronics group and their project

The excellent

1. The workouts were excellent, the BoFS and many workouts had more focus
2. The rock music by the Raghu Dixit Project
3. Met some free lancers using Linux, they did not have stalls, but their projects sounded very exciting
4. The participants were serious about what they wanted to work on, which is very exciting to see
5. Networking and spending time with people

The awesome

1. The food arrangement, Hallimane

Hmmm.. Did I just put my neck out and at the same time be lazy? BTW, I wrote my Linux For You article while attending the conference :)

Some photos from FOSS.IN 2009 (more to come)

I've not yet had the time to sit down and write a report and my experience, but here are some photos

From James Morris at Flickr

From Kishore Bhargava at Flickr

The entire set that Kishore has can be accessed here

Thought for the day in Hindi

जो याद नहीं उसे भोल गए हम
जिसे भूल गए उसका नहीं गम!

Gops views on Mumbai 26/11

Well worth a read! We've had lot of heros, lets remember and pray for them, the victims and their families and that such things don't repeat themselves anywhere in the world.

Smooth upgrade to F12

My first post after the upgrade. The upgrade sailed through smoothly and I got back the packages I had to uninstall. The first issue I faced was the nomodeset issue. X would not recognize any resolution beyond "800x600", I had to pass nomodeset as kernel boot parameter to get my original resolution back.

I was also happy to see my back for resource counter scalability included in F12
(run rpm -q --changelog kernel | less)
* Mon Oct 12 2009 Kyle McMartin 2.6.31.4-75.rc2
- improve-resource-counter-scalability.patch: Fix scalability issues
on big machines, requested by prarit.

I am all set to sail, kudos to those who helped make Fedora and especially the upgrade path so smooth.

Upgrade Journey to Fedora 12

After reading the ever so useful YumUpgradeFaq, I've started upgrading my system from F11 to F12. I had some scarifies to make along the way, I had to remove about 100 of my favourite RPMS, so that the upgrade starts

yum finally told me...

Transaction Summary

=======================

Install 238 Package(s)

Upgrade 4512 Package(s)

Remove 4 Package(s)

Reinstall 0 Package(s)

Downgrade 0 Package(s)

Total download size: 5.0 G

Is this ok [y/N]:

Wish me luck!

Fedora 12 is out

I use Fedora on my desktop, now more than ever. I am currently well setup on Fedora 11, with 3D graphics (yeah, I can get Secondlife, google earth, etc to work with great speed) setup. Setting up 3D graphics was not easy (but that should be another blog entry. I also have my favourite sound system ALSA setup. I could never get used to Pulseaudio or get it to work the way I like. I am still trying to get webgl to work on my browser. The features in Fedora 12 are too tempting and of course I am already using some of the latest features via rawhide.

I guess its time to plunge into Fedora 12! Do take a look at the release tour of Fedora 12.

Thought for the day (Hindi)

मैं अकेला ही चला था जानिब-ऐ-मंजिल मगर, लोग साथ आते गए और कारवाँ बंता गया

मजरूह सुल्तानपुरी

Great Knock Dravid!

(From: cricket.yahoo.com)

Todays knock by Dravid's got to be the best I've remembered from anyone in a long long time. I've witnessed the record breaking knock with Laxman to help India win against Australia in India, the 200 odd to help India win against Australia in Australia.

I loved this one because of the determination and absolutely wonderful confident stroke play. This knock also got Dravid in the 11,000+ squad (only the 5th cricketer to have that honour). Bravo on the six, the quality of shots and the confidence. Keep the aggression coming Dravid! I love it!

Interesting memory cgroup controller links

Here are some interesting links on memory cgroup that I found online (NOTE: I've not referred to my own papers)

1. http://www.dmtf.org/svm09/presentation/Corset_Service-oriented_Resource_Management_System_Linux.ppt
2. http://www.socallinuxexpo.org/scale7x/sites/scale7x.socallinuxexpo.org/files/openvz-scale7x-resource-management_0.ppt
3. http://en.opensuse.org/Cgroup
4. http://elinux.org/Memory_Management
5. http://tree.celinuxforum.org/CelfPubWik/ELC2009Presentations?action=AttachFile&do=get&target=celf_mem_notify.pdf
6. http://www.xtreemos.eu/publications/project-deliverables/d2-1-7.pdf
7. http://siena.linux.it/linuxday09/presentazioni/andrea-righi-linux-kernel-hacking-process-containers.pdf
8. http://www.linux-foundation.jp/uploads/seminar20081119/CgroupMemcgMaster.pdf
9. linuxplumbersconf.org/2009/slides/Dave-Hansen-oom-v3.pdf

NOTE: This is just a partial list of references.