Consistently backup your virtual machines using libvirt and zfs – part 1

How to backup virtual machines is a pretty interesting topic and a lot could be said. COW file systems like zfs or btrfs actually do most of the job for you, thanks to their snapshotting capabilities. Unfortunately that’s not enough to get consistent backups, because taking a snapshot of a running VM is very similar […]

Optane 900p 480G: zfs vs btrfs vs ext4 benchmarks

I recently bought a new server with an Optane 900p 480G and I decided to give zfs a try instead of using btrfs as usual (I will not use raid or other devices, just a single 900p).

I will use my Optane drive to host several KVM virtual machines.

I have been fooled to think […]

IKEA: Swedish inefficiency at its best

IKEA's customer service.

IKEA’s customer service.

This is somehow a technical blog so I’m sorry to bother you with personal complaints like this one, but as an Engineer I cannot avoid to be stunned watching such impractical implementations. Some of the IKEA furnishings are sold as two (or more) separate pieces, which is fine. The funny part is […]

Radeonsi with si scheduler humiliates Catalyst in all tests

Following my last article I decided to test Axel Davy’s si scheduler and run the very same OpenGL4+ tests with both radeonsi+si scheduler and Catalyst. The si scheduler is such a huge performance boost! Not only it is faster, but now radeonsi is faster than Catalyst in *all* tests, sometimes by a wide margin! Catalyst […]

Radeonsi vs AMD Catalyst vs NVIDIA proprietary on GL4+ workloads

[…]

Counter Strike Global Offensive: radeonsi is on par with Catalyst

AMD Radeon HD 7950 using kernel 3.17-rc5-drm-next-3.18-wip + hyperz (R600_DEBUG=hyperz). I’m also using libdrm git, xf86-video-ati git, llvm 3.6 git, mesa git and xorg-server 1.17.0 RC 1. Catalyst version is 14.6 beta2 (kernel 3.14.3, xorg-server 1.15.2).

You can find all the info on my system here: http://openbenchmarking.org/result/1409232-DARK-140923107

[…]

wine: vanilla vs CSMT (d3dstream) vs Gallium nine vs Catalyst

How to achieve the best possible performance with wine? I compared vanilla wine using latest radeonsi open source drivers, wine with the CSMT (d3dstream) patchset and wine with the Gallium nine patchset. I also compared the results to latest Catalyst drivers using wine patched with CSMT (d3dstream). Surprisingly radeonsi + gallium nine beats Catalyst + […]

A new linuxsystems overlay: wine-nine

This overlay allows you to build latest git version of mesa and wine with the gallium nine patches. Wine has to translate DirectX => OpenGL => Gallium, which add complications and brings inefficiency. Thanks to the gallium nine state tracker we simply skip the OpenGL translation. More info here: http://ixit.cz/faster-wine-games-with-open-source-drivers-d3d9-aka-gallium-nine/

This patchset is maintained by […]

New ebuild: app-emulation/wine-1.7.24 CSMT (d3dstream)

You can find it in the wine-d3dstream overlay: http://www.linuxsystems.it/overlay/

A new linuxsystems overlay: wine

Latest wine version is currently 1.7.26 while latest version available in gentoo repositories is only 1.7.21. This overlay allows you to build latest version of wine with pulseaudio, pipelight (compholio) and gstreamer support.

You can find my app-emulation/wine-1.7.26 ebuild in the new wine overlay: http://www.linuxsystems.it/overlay/