5 ms·

I mean, this only makes sense -- OSes are no longer a core product in the server world; they're just a part of the application stack. The hypervisor / orchestra

by exelius 10y ago

I mean, this only makes sense -- OSes are no longer a core product in the server world; they're just a part of the application stack. The hypervisor / orchestrator is the critical part, and that's Hyper-V in the Microsoft world. Also, this patch doesn't strike me as monumental. Really, it strikes me as one of the first things you would do when configuring a disk driver for a VM (mapped I/O is unnecessary overhead for most VM configurations as the hypervisor and/or SAN remaps it anyway). Has Microsoft not supported FreeBSD well under HyperV in the past?

mveety 10y ago
Hyper-v kinda sucked with FreeBSD, mostly just overall poor performance. If you needed FreeBSD that would dictate what you ran it on, so hyper-v would be out. If you had to run hyper-v, FreeBSD would be out. Many enterprises find Windows to be mandatory, even if it's just running virtual machines, even if a better solution is out there. UNIX is often replaceable because "they're all the same."
pjmlp 10y ago
Yeah, the cloud is finally catching up with the mainframes.
- nickpsecurity 10y ago
  They'll have caught up enough when they have I/O coprocessors as general as Channel I/O. Are there any server standards close to that? And CPU's with the needed I/O accelerators?
  - pixl97 10y ago
    Why would we want specialized processors when a modern CPU core is filled with dozens of CPU cores? And no, I'm not trying to be snarky, but Channel IO sounds like something from the days when CPU was rare and expensive but doesn't make sense in an architecture where lots of cores exist and IOPS and network are generally a bigger issue. What am I missing?
    - marcosdumay 10y ago
      We want them very badly, because they have a wider bandwidth at the cost of slower clock. What I don't get is why the GP is stating that servers need to get them, when every PC comes with specialized IO processors for decades already.
      - nickpsecurity 10y ago
        "when every PC comes with specialized IO processors for decades already." No they do not. My main CPU (s) gets interrupted by my drivers nonstop. As networking or disk goes up, my apps slow down even if they don't depend on them since the CPU is absorbing the hit of many of those operations. That's totally different than a Channel I/O-like model where a dedicate CPU manages all that with apps just handing it off asynchronously in a high-level way, I/O processor doing low-level stuff, & scheduler making sure nothing slows down due to waiting on it. That's why my CPU is sometimes under 10% utilization when it could be working big time but mainframes are more like 90-97%. Or maybe you meant they have specialized hardware... dedicated ASIC blocks... to accelerate TCP/IP processing, compression, filesystems, database operations, and so on? I didn't see those for decades either outside custom cards or chips on the motherboard. Definitely not in SOC's designed for them with smooth CPU integration. That's come online recently under semi-custom banner at AMD/Intel & all these Cavium-style processors that merge CPU's + HW accelerators. So, there's a difference between what highly-efficient, I/O model some products have right now and what my desktop computer has. The servers are catching up with all kinds of fast buses and add-on cards. Need changes at CPU and OS levels, though, for max effect.
        snaky 10y ago
        > Channel I/O-like model where a dedicate CPU manages all that with apps just handing it off asynchronously in a high-level way Wheels being reinvented for some time now in high-load world. Polling drivers instead of IRQ-on-every-packet-arrived, smart NICs, CPU-pinned queues and processes. Looking at e.g. DPDK architecture, it's almost mainframe type of Channel IO actually.
  - jclulow 10y ago
    No, thank goodness, but not for lack of trying[1]! The I2O group seemed to favour channel I/O on the grounds that it was an excellent way to sell more proprietary hardware and restricted access to specifications. Fortunately they were not successful in simultaneously making the x86 world more proprietary and more expensive all at once. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2O https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2O
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      I didn't know about that one. Sounds like a failed implementation of the concept. A better one that someone told me about recently was some embedded products combining a good CPU with a weaker one (eg Cortex M0) that absorbed & queued interrupts to preserve real-time properties. Sandia did something similar in SSP processor. lowRISC is experimenting with their minion cores. So, I think there's still potential. Especially given the formal verification and security strategies for I/O programs were often different in academic literature than algorithmic ones. Specialized hardware might facilitate improving their security or availability in provable way.
  - rodgerd 10y ago
    > They'll have caught up enough when they have I/O coprocessors as general as Channel I/O. Modern Zs have largely removed I/O copros - none of the Z9 through Z12 have dedicated offload for DASD.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      Appreciate the tip. In that case, the servers could get ahead of them especially if they use simplified cores for interrupt-heavy processing and HW acceleration for algorithm/protocol state machines that rarely change.

by exelius 10y ago

mveety 10y ago

Hyper-v kinda sucked with FreeBSD, mostly just overall poor performance. If you needed FreeBSD that would dictate what you ran it on, so hyper-v would be out. If you had to run hyper-v, FreeBSD would be out. Many enterprises find Windows to be mandatory, even if it's just running virtual machines, even if a better solution is out there. UNIX is often replaceable because "they're all the same."

pjmlp 10y ago

Yeah, the cloud is finally catching up with the mainframes.

nickpsecurity 10y ago
They'll have caught up enough when they have I/O coprocessors as general as Channel I/O. Are there any server standards close to that? And CPU's with the needed I/O accelerators?
- pixl97 10y ago
  Why would we want specialized processors when a modern CPU core is filled with dozens of CPU cores? And no, I'm not trying to be snarky, but Channel IO sounds like something from the days when CPU was rare and expensive but doesn't make sense in an architecture where lots of cores exist and IOPS and network are generally a bigger issue. What am I missing?
  - marcosdumay 10y ago
    We want them very badly, because they have a wider bandwidth at the cost of slower clock. What I don't get is why the GP is stating that servers need to get them, when every PC comes with specialized IO processors for decades already.
    - nickpsecurity 10y ago
      "when every PC comes with specialized IO processors for decades already." No they do not. My main CPU (s) gets interrupted by my drivers nonstop. As networking or disk goes up, my apps slow down even if they don't depend on them since the CPU is absorbing the hit of many of those operations. That's totally different than a Channel I/O-like model where a dedicate CPU manages all that with apps just handing it off asynchronously in a high-level way, I/O processor doing low-level stuff, & scheduler making sure nothing slows down due to waiting on it. That's why my CPU is sometimes under 10% utilization when it could be working big time but mainframes are more like 90-97%. Or maybe you meant they have specialized hardware... dedicated ASIC blocks... to accelerate TCP/IP processing, compression, filesystems, database operations, and so on? I didn't see those for decades either outside custom cards or chips on the motherboard. Definitely not in SOC's designed for them with smooth CPU integration. That's come online recently under semi-custom banner at AMD/Intel & all these Cavium-style processors that merge CPU's + HW accelerators. So, there's a difference between what highly-efficient, I/O model some products have right now and what my desktop computer has. The servers are catching up with all kinds of fast buses and add-on cards. Need changes at CPU and OS levels, though, for max effect.
      - snaky 10y ago
        > Channel I/O-like model where a dedicate CPU manages all that with apps just handing it off asynchronously in a high-level way Wheels being reinvented for some time now in high-load world. Polling drivers instead of IRQ-on-every-packet-arrived, smart NICs, CPU-pinned queues and processes. Looking at e.g. DPDK architecture, it's almost mainframe type of Channel IO actually.
- jclulow 10y ago
  No, thank goodness, but not for lack of trying[1]! The I2O group seemed to favour channel I/O on the grounds that it was an excellent way to sell more proprietary hardware and restricted access to specifications. Fortunately they were not successful in simultaneously making the x86 world more proprietary and more expensive all at once. [1]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2O https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/I2O
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    I didn't know about that one. Sounds like a failed implementation of the concept. A better one that someone told me about recently was some embedded products combining a good CPU with a weaker one (eg Cortex M0) that absorbed & queued interrupts to preserve real-time properties. Sandia did something similar in SSP processor. lowRISC is experimenting with their minion cores. So, I think there's still potential. Especially given the formal verification and security strategies for I/O programs were often different in academic literature than algorithmic ones. Specialized hardware might facilitate improving their security or availability in provable way.
- rodgerd 10y ago
  > They'll have caught up enough when they have I/O coprocessors as general as Channel I/O. Modern Zs have largely removed I/O copros - none of the Z9 through Z12 have dedicated offload for DASD.
  - nickpsecurity 10y ago
    Appreciate the tip. In that case, the servers could get ahead of them especially if they use simplified cores for interrupt-heavy processing and HW acceleration for algorithm/protocol state machines that rarely change.