Move to Wordpress

Not having gtk-key-theme-name = "Emacs" work in the Edit HTML tab for blogger is the final straw.

In the future, follow me here.

Also, Google's keyboard shortcuts feature works again. Yay!

Did anyone else notice that Google got rid of Keyboard Shortcuts?

lame...

How to use oprofile correctly in Fedora

First of all, there is no correct way to use oprofile. It's just that people using it w/o --separate=kernel are out of their minds. Very rarely do I want to profile the system as a whole, and frequently I want to look at an individual process. With --separate=kernel you can do both.

Installing kernel-debug info

First make sure your debug-info repo is enabled. You will find that in the /etc/yum.repos.d directory. Then,

$ yum -y install kernel-debuginfo
$ rpm -ql kernel-debuginfo |grep vmlinux
/usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/2.6.18-128.1.14.el5/vmlinux

Starting the profiler using opcontrol

opcontrol --separate=kernel --vmlinux=/usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/2.6.18-128.1.14.el5/vmlinux
opcontrol --start

Obviously you must have the correct location of your vmlinux. Fedora and Red Hat based distros like to keep them in /usr/lib/debug/lib/modules/.

Do stuff

In my case, I'd like to profile the command:

# time dd if=/dev/zero of=/dev/raw/raw1 bs=2048 count=100000
100000+0 records in
100000+0 records out
204800000 bytes (205 MB) copied, 10.6901 seconds, 19.2 MB/s

real 0m10.692s
user 0m0.036s
sys 0m4.884s

Finish profiling

Now you should tell the profiler to finish:

opcontrol --stop
oparchive -o /var/lib/oprofile/samples/current/

oparchive tars all the necessary executables and debug info files such that it can easily be taken offline and analyzed on another machine.

Display results

In my case,

# opreport -l image:/bin/dd
warning: /e1000e could not be found.
warning: /ehci_hcd could not be found.
warning: /ide_cd could not be found.
warning: /libata could not be found.
warning: /scsi_mod could not be found.
warning: /sd_mod could not be found.
warning: /uhci_hcd could not be found.
CPU: Core 2, speed 2992.57 MHz (estimated)
Counted CPU_CLK_UNHALTED events (Clock cycles when not halted) with a unit mask of 0x00 (Unhalted core cycles) count 100000
samples % image name symbol name
90680 61.5134 vmlinux do_generic_mapping_read
18997 12.8867 vmlinux iowrite16
12418 8.4238 vmlinux pci_iomap
2983 2.0235 libata (no symbols)
1633 1.1078 vmlinux gen_pool_add
1442 0.9782 vmlinux __pud_alloc
1218 0.8262 scsi_mod (no symbols)
974 0.6607 vmlinux __blockdev_direct_IO
727 0.4932 vmlinux .text.do_gettimeoffset_tsc
547 0.3711 vmlinux schedule
423 0.2869 vmlinux __link_path_walk
343 0.2327 vmlinux tcp_rcv_established
335 0.2272 vmlinux do_gettimeofday
320 0.2171 libc-2.5.so __read_nocancel

This list of symbols and events goes on for miles, so I'm not going to list the entire thing.

Each processor has their own flags to track things like L1/L2 cache misses, TLB misses, and other neat stuff. For extra credit, put some of your favorites in the comments section. Make sure to put your cpu model in with whatever flags you're including. I may update this with some more flags, or post about it later.

For more info, go to http://oprofile.sourceforge.net/doc/index.html

Tomorrow, or actually today, is a big day,

First of all obviously it is super Tuesday. But then you have to remember that the Giants won on Sunday and they're having a parade tomorrow, so that's going to be crazy. It will be down Broadway in the Canyon of Heroes. That's right near the Red Hat office, so I'll basically be able to catch it during lunch. Also, there is a class that I want to take and another exam for this week. This all on top of an assignment to learn about database products that I've never had to deal with before.

It's going to be fun ;)

Hey all, I just learned that Taviso's website is down at dev.gentoo.org. That means that all of the trusty configs and awesome screenshots are gone forever.

...or so I thought. I used the internet way back machine to great effect in order to get at his old pages. Here it is in the latest archive form:

http://web.archive.org/web/20070202002340rn_1/dev.gentoo.org/~taviso/

from the stealing upstream thunder dept:

I've been trying to stay out of the whole Ubuntu vs. Other Distros thing for awhile, but I understand where some of the frustration comes from. Take this short sighted blog post for example. The guy goes on to list 8 features (you didn't know about) in _Gnome_, but totally centers on Ubuntu!

Where is the credit for the Gnome devs? Why is this post Ubuntu specific? It almost makes me want to:

1. create an "8 Features you didn't know about in " blog post
2. submit that to digg.
3. watch it get relativly few digs because it doesn't have ubuntu in the title.
4. ...
5. Profit!

Fedroa 8 NSPluginWrapper

I just installed fedora 8 x86_64, and I must say, I'm quite impressed. I'll experiment/blog more tomorrow, but for right now it's safe to say that I'm really optimistic and in my experince it's MUCH better than f7. The 64-bit seems much faster too (I didn't know all Core 2 was 64-bit), though I don't know since it could just be performance increase in f8 itself, or it could just be perception.

One thing I did get stuck on was nsplugin wrapper. Fedora 8 tips and tricks helped out, though you might want to modify the instructions a bit. Here's what worked for me:

yum install nspluginwrapper nspluginwrapper.x86
mozilla-plugin-config -u

nspluginwrapper is probably already installed (it was for me).

PS Another thing I noticed were that the fonts were off, Havoc Pennington mentioned this earlier...