Today, I was reminded of a Jim Starkey quote on the Random Query Generator:
“The Colonoscopy of Database Software”
– Jim Starkey
If your project does not have something that you can adapt that quote to, odds are your testing is inadequate.
With the whole OpenPower thing, a lot of low level firmware is being open sourced, which is really exciting for the platform – the less proprietary code sitting in memory the better in my books.
If you go to https://github.com/open-power you’ll see code for a bunch of the low level firmware for OpenPower and POWER8.
Hostboot is the bit of code that brings up the CPU and skiboot both sets up hardware and provides runtime services to Linux (such as talking to the service processor, if one is present).
Patches to https://github.com/open-power/skiboot/blob/master/doc/overview.txt are (of course) really quite welcome. It shouldn’t be too hard to get your head around the basics.
To see the Linux side of the OPAL interface, go check out linux/arch/powerpc/platforms/powernv -there you can see how we ask OPAL to do things for us.
If you buy a POWER8 system from IBM running PowerKVM you’re running this code.
About 1.5 months ago I blogged on MySQL 5.6 on POWER andtalked about what I had to poke at to make modern MySQL versions run and run well on shiny POWER8 systems.
One of those bugs, MySQL bug 47213 (InnoDB mutex/rw_lock should be conscious of memory ordering other than Intel) was recently marked as CLOSED by the Oracle MySQL team and the upcoming 5.6.20 and 5.7.5 releases should have the fix!
This is excellent news for those wanting to run MySQL on SMP systems that don’t have an Intel-like memory model (e.g. POWER and MIPS64).
This was the most major and invasive patch in the patchset for MySQL on POWER. It’s absolutely fantastic that this has made it into 5.6.20 and 5.7.5 and may mean that these new versions will work out-of-the-box on POWER (I haven’t checked… but from glancing back at my patchset there was only one other patch that could be related to correctness rather than performance).