[9fans] 9vx Patches

[9fans] 9vx Patches

[Devon H. O'Dell]

Hey guys,

Back in my ``let's have fun with Plan 9'' yearly phase.

Here I come back and I see some really cool work. 9vx definitely is
the coolest thing I've seen so far, and devtrace looks pretty nifty
too. What's really cool to me about them is that they're available and
there is open work to be done with them. So I've started hacking away.

My 9vx has a couple changes that I found useful / thought would be fun
to implement / thought others might find useful. A brief synopsis:

* Memory bounds -- gives 9vx an upper bound on resident memory usage
as it limits the size of the pagefile. Set by running 9vx with -m [MB]

* CPU bounds -- only works on FreeBSD so far. I've got a Linux port of
that management code, but it doesn't seem to actually do the right
thing (and it hasn't been a priority to fix since I rarely run Linux).
I do plan on fixing it, but if someone else wants to fix it first,
that'd be fine by me, too. Darwin support looks unlikely because,
although the libkvm stuff is there and likely would work after just
changing some of the member names of where things look, it has neither
a clone(2) or rfork(2) implementation. If anybody has an idea about
how to spawn and disassociate a child process in Darwin so it doesn't
receive its parents' signals, let me know. Set by running 9vx with -l
[% CPU].

* Set window width/height on the console. Set with -w [width] and -h
[height], respectively.

* Lock tracing. I needed this when debugging some of the netstack
stuff because I screwed up a qunlock which deadlocked the system. Set
by toggling -L.

Things in the works:

* Native Plan 9 netstack. It's ported, it compiles, but my virtual
ethernet device doesn't seem to be transmitting anything (though I
haven't done any extensive tests). See also:
http://testbed.dh0.us/~dho/fuxyes.png

* Porting devtrace. Needs some changes to compile with gas; the
#pragmas are useless, but I think should work after a little more
tweaking.

* FreeBSD/amd64 support. I don't think it works yet, but it compiles.
I don't rightly understand what all the LDT modification does on Linux
x86_64 in relation to what I'm actually doing with %gs (hints from
people with knowledge welcome).

Other stuff

* Automatic provisioning via a web browser. Yeah, Plan 9 in the web
browser (if you have Java, I guess -- otherwise it's just VNC).
http://testbed.dh0.us/ -- this code isn't version controlled, but I
could probably put it in hg with little effort.

The code for the rest of the stuff is at http://testbed.dh0.us:8000/

--dho

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[ron minnich]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 4:10 PM, Devon H. O'Dell <devon.odell@gmail.com> wrote:

> * Porting devtrace. Needs some changes to compile with gas; the
> #pragmas are useless, but I think should work after a little more
> tweaking.

note that those pragmas are the tip of the iceberg.
gcc inserts the profiling code; on Plan 9, the linker does it. There
will be a few things to fix here.

neat stuff you are doing.

ron

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[ron minnich]

so here's a potentially interesting idea. Since you are running plan 9
under Linux with 9vx, consider using the TAU toolkit to measure it.

http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/tau/home.php

we've used these tools to optmize an MPI library and they are quite powerful.

See what you think.

ron

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[Roman Shaposhnik]

On Dec 17, 2008, at 4:33 PM, ron minnich wrote:
> so here's a potentially interesting idea. Since you are running plan 9
> under Linux with 9vx, consider using the TAU toolkit to measure it.
>
> http://www.cs.uoregon.edu/research/tau/home.php
>
> we've used these tools to optmize an MPI library and they are quite
> powerful.

TAU is good. There's also a Sun Studio Performance Analyzer that, to
my taste,
is a bit more tightly integrated than TAU and seems to be more scalable:
     http://developers.sun.com/sunstudio/overview/topics/analyzer_index.html

In fact, Ron, now that you've mentioned it -- I'm going to try the
PerfAn
on 9vx myself ;-) And here's the question for you: how representative
the behavior of 9vx is supposed to be of the regular Plan9 kernel?

Thanks,
Roman.

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[ron minnich]

On Wed, Dec 17, 2008 at 4:43 PM, Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com> wrote:

> In fact, Ron, now that you've mentioned it -- I'm going to try the PerfAn
> on 9vx myself ;-) And here's the question for you: how representative
> the behavior of 9vx is supposed to be of the regular Plan9 kernel?

I don't know but the code sure looked like a plan 9 kernel to me.

ron

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[Roman Shaposhnik]

On Dec 17, 2008, at 4:10 PM, Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
> * Automatic provisioning via a web browser. Yeah, Plan 9 in the web
> browser (if you have Java, I guess -- otherwise it's just VNC).
> http://testbed.dh0.us/ -- this code isn't version controlled, but I
> could probably put it in hg with little effort.

Really nice bunch of things! I'm looking forward to seeing the
implementations. As for the above service -- is it currently
off-line? I can log-in and create an instance, but when I
try to connect to it here's what I get:

snazvx: dashboard
control
id	name	state	activate	view
10	rvs-test	running	stop	view (or vncviewer testbed.dh0.us:5810)


vncviewer: ConnectToTcpAddr: connect: Connection refused
Unable to connect to VNC server

Thanks,
Roman.

P.S. Has anybody experimented with running 9vx on Amazon's EC2 yet?

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[Devon H. O'Dell]

2008/12/17 Roman Shaposhnik <rvs@sun.com>:
> On Dec 17, 2008, at 4:10 PM, Devon H. O'Dell wrote:
>>
>> * Automatic provisioning via a web browser. Yeah, Plan 9 in the web
>> browser (if you have Java, I guess -- otherwise it's just VNC).
>> http://testbed.dh0.us/ -- this code isn't version controlled, but I
>> could probably put it in hg with little effort.
>
> Really nice bunch of things! I'm looking forward to seeing the
> implementations. As for the above service -- is it currently
> off-line? I can log-in and create an instance, but when I
> try to connect to it here's what I get:

Thanks! The 9vx that is installed by this though is the one from
Russ's tip... mine's still not perfect and currently doesn't do any
networking.

> snazvx: dashboard
> control
> id      name    state   activate        view
> 10      rvs-test        running stop    view (or vncviewer
> testbed.dh0.us:5810)

The vncviewer text is wrong; it's just vncviewer testbed.dh0.us:10 --
I haven't fixed this yet :(

> vncviewer: ConnectToTcpAddr: connect: Connection refused
> Unable to connect to VNC server
>
> Thanks,
> Roman.

--dho

> P.S. Has anybody experimented with running 9vx on Amazon's EC2 yet?

I would if it was free and I didn't have a server :\

--dho

Re: [9fans] 9vx Patches

[erik quanstrom]

> I would if it was free and I didn't have a server :\

and more reliable than street power.

- erik