Author Archives: Stewart Smith

Lesson 124 in why scales on a graph matter…

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The original article presented two graphs: one of MariaDB searches (which are increasing) and the other showing MySQL searches (decreasing or leveling out). It turns out that the y axis REALLY matters.

I honestly expected better….

Compiling your own firmware for Barreleye (OpenCompute OpenPOWER system)

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Aaron Sullivan announced on the Rackspace Blog that you can now get your own Barreleye system! What’s great is that the code for the Barreleye platform is upstream in the op-build project, which means you can build your own firmware for them (just like garrison, the “IBM S822LC for HPC” system I blogged about a few days ago).

Remarkably, to build an image for the host firmware, it’s eerily similar to any other platform:

git clone --recursive https://github.com/open-power/op-build.git
cd op-build
. op-build-env
op-build barreleye_defconfig
op-build

…and then you wait. You can cross compile on x86.

You’ve been able to build firmware for these machines with upstream code since Feb/March (I wouldn’t recommend running with builds from then though, try the latest release instead).

Hopefully, someone involved in OpenBMC can write on how to build the BMC firmware.

Compiling your own firmware for the S822LC for HPC

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IBM (my employer) recently announced  the new S822LC for HPC POWER8+NVLINK NVIDIA P100 GPUs server (press release, IBM Systems Blog, The Register). The “For HPC” suffix on the model number is significant, as the S822LC is a different machine. What makes the “for HPC” variant different is that the POWER8 CPU has (in addition to PCIe), logic for NVLink to connect the CPU to NVIDIA GPUs.

There’s also the NVIDIA Tesla P100 GPUs which are NVIDIA’s latest in an SXM2 form factor, but instead of delving into GPUs, I’m going to tell you how to compile the firmware for this machine.

You see, this is an OpenPOWER machine. It’s an OpenPOWER machine where the vendor (in this case IBM) has worked to get all the needed code upstream, so you can see exactly what goes into a firmware build.

To build the latest host firmware (you can cross compile on x86 as we use buildroot to build a cross compiler):

git clone --recursive https://github.com/open-power/op-build.git
cd op-build
. op-build-env
op-build garrison_defconfig
op-build

That’s it! Give it a while and you’ll end up with output/images/garrison.pnor – which is a firmware image to flash onto PNOR. The machine name is garrison as that’s the code name for the “S822LC for HPC” (you may see Minsky in the press, but that’s a rather new code name, Garrison has been around for a lot longer as a name).

Microsoft Chicago – retro in qemu!

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So, way back when (sometime in the early 1990s) there was Windows 3.11 and times were… for Workgroups. There was this Windows NT thing, this OS/2 thing and something brewing at Microsoft to attempt to make the PC less… well, bloody awful for a user.

Again, thanks to abandonware sites, it’s possible now to try out very early builds of Microsoft Chicago – what would become Windows 95. With the earliest build I could find (build 56), I set to work. The installer worked from an existing Windows 3.11 install.

I ended up using full system emulation rather than normal qemu later on, as things, well, booted in full emulation and didn’t otherwise (I was building from qemu master… so it could have actually been a bug fix).

chicago-launch-setupMmmm… Windows 3.11 File Manager, the fact that I can still use this is a testament to something, possibly too much time with Windows 3.11.

chicago-welcome-setupchicago-setupUnfortunately, I didn’t have the Plus Pack components (remember Microsoft Plus! ?- yes, the exclamation mark was part of the product, it was the 1990s.) and I’m not sure if they even would have existed back then (but the installer did ask).

chicago-install-dirObviously if you were testing Chicago, you probably did not want to upgrade your working Windows install if this was a computer you at all cared about. I installed into C:\CHICAGO because, well – how could I not!

chicago-installingThe installation went fairly quickly – after all, this isn’t a real 386 PC and it doesn’t have of-the-era disks – everything was likely just in the linux page cache.

chicago-install-networkI didn’t really try to get network going, it may not have been fully baked in this build, or maybe just not really baked in this copy of it, but the installer there looks a bit familiar, but not like the Windows 95 one – maybe more like NT 3.1/3.51 ?

But at the end… it installed and it was time to reboot into Chicago:
chicago-bootSo… this is what Windows 95 looked like during development back in July 1993 – nearly exactly two years before release. There’s some Windows logos that appear/disappear around the place, which are arguably much cooler than the eventual Windows 95 boot screen animation. The first boot experience was kind of interesting too:
Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-57-00Luckily, there was nothing restricting the beta site ID or anything. I just entered the number 1, and was then told it needed to be 6 digits – so beta site ID 123456 it is! The desktop is obviously different both from Windows 3.x and what ended up in Windows 95.

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-57-48Those who remember Windows 3.1 may remember Dr Watson as an actual thing you could run, but it was part of the whole diagnostics infrastructure in Windows, and here (as you can see), it runs by default. More odd is the “Switch To Chicago” task (which does nothing if opened) and “Tracker”. My guess is that the “Switch to Chicago” is the product of some internal thing for launching the new UI. I have no ideawhat the “Tracker” is, but I think I found a clue in the “Find File” app:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 14-10-10Not only can you search with regular expressions, but there’s “Containing text”, could it be indexing? No, it totally isn’t. It’s all about tracking/reporting problems:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 14-15-19Well, that wasn’t as exciting as I was hoping for (after all, weren’t there interesting database like file systems being researched at Microsoft in the early 1990s?). It’s about here I should show the obligatory About box:
Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-58-10It’s… not polished, and there’s certainly that feel throughout the OS, it’s not yet polished – and two years from release: that’s likely fair enough. Speaking of not perfect:

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 20-59-03When something does crash, it asks you to describe what went wrong, i.e. provide a Clue for Dr. Watson:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-09-22

But, most importantly, Solitaire is present! You can browse the Programs folder and head into Games and play it! One odd tihng is that applications have two >> at the end, and there’s a “Parent Folder” entry too.

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-01-24Solitair itself? Just as I remember.

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 21-21-27Notably, what is missing is anything like the Start menu, which is probably the key UI element introduced in Windows 95 that’s still with us today. Instead, you have this:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 11-55-15That’s about the least exciting Windows menu possible. There’s the eye menu too, which is this:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 11-56-12More unfinished things are found in the “File cabinet”, such as properties for anything:
Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-02-00But let’s jump into Control Panels, which I managed to get to by heading to C:\CHICAGO\Control.sys – which isn’t exactly obvious, but I think you can find it through Programs as well.Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-02-41Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-05-40The “Window Metrics” application is really interesting! It’s obvious that the UI was not solidified yet, that there was a lot of experimenting to do. This application lets you change all sorts of things about the UI:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-05-57My guess is that this was used a lot internally to twiddle things to see what worked well.

Another unfinished thing? That familiar Properties for My Computer, which is actually “Advanced System Features” in the control panel, and from the [Sample Information] at the bottom left, it looks like we may not be getting information about the machine it’s running on.

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-06-39

You do get some information in the System control panel, but a lot of it is unfinished. It seems as if Microsoft was experimenting with a few ways to express information and modify settings.

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-07-13But check out this awesome picture of a hard disk for Virtual Memory:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-07-47The presence of the 386 Enhanced control panel shows how close this build still was to Windows 3.1:

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-08-08At the same time, we see hints of things going 32 bit – check out the fact that we have both Clock and Clock32! Notepad, in its transition to 32bit, even dropped the pad and is just Note32!

Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-11-10Well, that’s enough for today, time to shut down the machine:
Screenshot from 2016-08-13 12-15-45

Windows 3.11 nostalgia

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Because OS/2 didn’t go so well… let’s try something I’m a lot more familiar with. To be honest, the last time I in earnest used Windows on the desktop was around 3.11, so I kind of know it back to front (fun fact: I’ve read the entire Windows 3.0 manual).

It turns out that once you have MS-DOS installed in qemu, installing Windows 3.11 is trivial. I didn’t even change any settings for Qemu, I just basically specced everything up to be very minimal (50MB RAM, 512mb disk).

win31-setupwin31-disk4win31-installedWindows 3.11 was not a fun time as soon as you had to do anything… nightmares of drivers, CONFIG.SYS and AUTOEXEC.BAT plague my mind. But hey, it’s damn fast on a modern processor.

OS/2 Warp Nostalgia

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Thanks to the joys of abandonware websites, you can play with some interesting things from the 1990s and before. One of those things is OS/2 Warp. Now, I had a go at OS/2 sometime in the 1990s after being warned by a friend that it was “pretty much impossible” to get networking going. My experience of OS/2 then was not revolutionary… It was, well, something else on a PC that wasn’t that exciting and didn’t really add a huge amount over Windows.

Now, I’m nowhere near insane enough to try this on my actual computer, and I’ve managed to not accumulate any ancient PCs….

Luckily, qemu helps with an emulator! If you don’t set your CPU to Pentium (or possibly something one or two generations newer) then things don’t go well. Neither does a disk that by today’s standards would be considered beyond tiny. Also, if you dare to try to use an unpartitioned hard disk – OH MY are you in trouble.

Also, try to boot off “Disk 1” and you get this:
os2-wrong-floppyPossibly the most friendly error message ever! But, once you get going (by booting the Installation floppy)… you get to see this:

Screenshot from 2016-08-07 19-12-19and indeed, you are doing the time warp of Operating Systems right here. After a bit of fun, you end up in FDISK:

os2-installos2-1gb-too-muchWhy I can’t create a partition… WHO KNOWS. But, I tried again with a 750MB disk that already had a partition on it and…. FAIL. I think this one was due to partition type, so I tried again with partition type of 6 – plain FAT16, and not W95 FAT16 (LBA). Some memory is coming back to me of larger drives and LBA and nightmares…

But that worked!

warp4-installingos2-checkingThen, the OS/2 WARP boot screen… which seems to stick around for a long time…..

os2-install-2and maybe I could get networking….

os2-networkLadies and Gentlemen, the wonders of having to select DHCP:

os2-dhcpIt still asked me for some config, but I gleefully ignored it (because that must be safe, right!?) and then I needed to select a network adapter! Due to a poor choice on my part, I started with a rtl8139, which is conspicuously absent from this fine list of Token Ring adapters:

os2-tokenringand then, more installing……

os2-more-installingbefore finally rebooting into….

os2-failand that, is where I realized there was beer in the fridge and that was going to be a lot more fun.

Using Smatch static analysis on OpenPOWER OPAL firmware

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For Skiboot, I’m always looking at new automated systems to find bugs in the code. A little while ago, I read about the Smatch tool developed by some folks at Oracle (they also wrote about using it on the Linux kernel).

I was eager to try it with skiboot to see if it could find anything.

Luckily, it was pretty easy. I built Smatch according to their documentation and then built skiboot:

make CHECK="/home/stewart/smatch/smatch" C=1 -j20 all check

Due to some differences in how we implement abort() and assert() in skiboot, I added “_abort”, “abort” and “assert_fail” to smatch_data/no_return_funcs in the Smatch source tree to silence some false positives.

It seems that there’s a few useful warnings there (some of which I’ve fixed in skiboot master already), along with some false positives around the preprocessor/complier tricks we do to ensure at compile time that an OPAL call definition has the correct number of arguments specified.

So far, so good though. Try it on your project!

Building OPAL firmware for POWER9

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Recently, we merged into the op-build project (the build scripts for OpenPOWER Firmware) a defconfig for building OPAL for (certain) POWER9 simulators. I won’t bother linking over to articles on the POWER9 chip or schedule (there’s search engines for that), but with this commit – if you happen to be able to get your hands on a POWER9 simulator, you can now boot to the petitboot bootloader on it!

We’re using upstream Linux 4.7.0-rc3 and upstream skiboot (master), so all of this code is already upstream!

Now, by no means is this complete. There’s some fairly fundamental things that are missing (e.g. PCI) – but how many other platforms can you build open source firmware for before you can even get your hands on a simulator?

Fuzzing Firmware – afl-fuzz + skiboot

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In what is likely to be a series on how firmware makes some normal tools harder to use, first I’m going to look at american fuzzy lop – a tool for fuzz testing that if you’re not using then you most certainly have bugs it’ll find for you.

I first got interested in afl-fuzz during Erik de Castro Lopo’s excellent linux.conf.au 2016 in Geelong earlier this year: “Fuzz all the things!“. In a previous life, the Random Query Generator managed to find a heck of a lot of bugs in MySQL (and Drizzle). For randgen info, see Philip Stoev’s talk on it from way back in 2009, a recent (2014) blog post on how Tokutek uses it and some notes on how it was being used at Oracle from 2013. Basically, the randgen was a specialized fuzzer that (given a grammar) would randomly generate SQL queries, and then (if the server didn’t crash), compare the result to some other database server (e.g. your previous version).

The afl-fuzz fuzzer takes a different approach – it’s a much more generic fuzzer rather than a targeted tool. Also, while tools such as the random query generator are extremely powerful and find specialized bugs, they’re hard to get started with. A huge benefit of afl-fuzz is that it’s really, really simple to get started with.

Basically, if you have a binary that takes input on stdin or as a (relatively small) file, afl-fuzz will just work and find bugs for you – read the Quick Start Guide and you’ll be finding bugs in no time!

For firmware of course, we’re a little different than a simple command line program as, well, we aren’t one! Luckily though, we have unit tests. These are just standard binaries that include a bunch of firmware code and get run in user space as part of “make check”. Also, just like unit tests for any project, people do send me patches that break tests (which I reject).

Some of these tests act on data we get from a place – maybe reading other parts of firmware off PNOR or interacting with data structures we get from other bits of firmware. For testing this code, it can be relatively easy to (for the test), read these off disk.

For skiboot, there’s a data structure we get from the service processor on FSP machines called HDAT. Basically, it’s just like the device tree, but different. Because yet another binary format is always a good idea (yes, that is laced with a heavy dose of sarcasm). One of the steps in early boot is to parse the HDAT data structure and convert it to a device tree. Luckily, we structured our code so that creating a unit test that can run in userspace was relatively easy, we just needed to dump this data structure out from a running machine. You can see the test case here. Basically, hdat_to_dt is a binary that reads the HDAT structure out of a pair of files and prints out a device tree. One of the regression tests we have is that we always produce the same output from the same input.

So… throwing that into AFL yielded a couple of pretty simple bugs, especially around aborting out on invalid data (it’s better to exit the process with failure rather than hit an assert). Nothing too interesting here on my simple input file, but it does mean that our parsing code exits “gracefully” on invalid data.

Another utility we have is actually a userspace utility for accessing the gard records in the flash. A GARD record is a record of a piece of hardware that has been deconfigured due to a fault (or a suspected fault). Usually this utility operates on PNOR flash through /dev/mtd – but really what it’s doing is talking to the libflash library, that we also use inside skiboot (and on OpenBMC) to read/write from flash directly, via /dev/mtd or just from a file. The good news? I haven’t been able to crash this utility yet!

So I modified the pflash utility to read from a file to attempt to fuzz the partition reading code we have for the partitioning format that’s on PNOR. So far, no crashes – although to even get it going I did have to fix a bug in the file handling code in pflash, so that’s already a win!

But crashing bugs aren’t the only type of bugs – afl-fuzz has exposed several cases where we act on uninitialized data. How? Well, we run some test cases under valgrind! This is the joy of user space unit tests for firmware – valgrind becomes a tool that you can run! Unfortunately, these bugs have been sitting in my “todo” pile (which is, of course, incredibly long).

Where to next? Fuzzing the firmware calls themselves would be nice – although that’s going to require a targeted tool that knows about what to pass each of the calls. Another round of afl-fuzz running would also be good, I’ve fixed a bunch of the simple things and having a better set of starting input files would be great (and likely expose more bugs).

First POWER9 bits merged into skiboot master

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I just merged in some base POWER9 support patches into skiboot. While this is in no way near complete or really enough to be interesting to anyone that isn’t heavily involved in POWER9 development, it’s nice to take upstream first and open source first so seriously that this level of base enablement patches is easy to merge in.

Other work that has gone on for POWER9 in open source projects include way back in November 2015 where work for the updated PowerISA 3.0 was merged into binutils and this year there’s been kernel work too.

Video of my Percona Live Talk: Why would I run MySQL/MariaDB on POWER anyway?

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Good news everyone! There’s video up for the talk I gave at Percona Live in April 2016 up: Why would I run MySQL/MariaDB on POWER anyway?

The talk is a general overview of POWER and why MySQL/MariaDB may be a good fit.

OpenPOWER, OpenCompute and fostering a firmware development community

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Recently, I was at the OpenPOWER Summit in San Jose where people could see the Barreleye server (specs and design here, initial Rackspace blog post here). Barreleye is an OpenCompute form factor POWER8 server. It’s not only an OpenPOWER machine, which means all of the host firmware is free and open source software, but there’s also OpenBMC meaning that the source to the OS and userspace running on the BMC (service processor) is also open!

In addition, the firmware enablement came from Foxconn (see this skiboot commit), which means we’re being successful in enabling people who aren’t part of IBM to join the development community for OpenPOWER firmware and get the changes needed to support their machines accepted upstream.

Granted, the size of a firmware development community is always likely to be relatively small, but I really like how Foxconn has shown leadership to other ODMs on interacting with and becoming part of the OpenPOWER firmware community.

“Toy” database on mainframes

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While much less common than 10 or 15 (err… even 20) years ago, you still sometimes hear MySQL being called a “toy” database. The good news is, when somebody says that, they’re admitting ignorance and you can help educate them!

Recently, a fellow IBMer submitted a pull request (and bug) to start having MySQL support on Z Series (s390x).

Generally speaking, when there’s effort being spent on getting something to run on Z, it is in no way considered a toy by those who’ll end up using it.

MySQL Contributions status

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This post is an update to the status of various MySQL bugs (some with patches) that I’ve filed over the past couple of years (or that people around me have). I’m not looking at POWER specific ones, as there are these too, but each of these bugs here deal with general correctness of the code base.

Firstly, let’s look at some points I’ve raised:

  • Incorrect locking for global_query_id (bug #72544)
    Raised on May 5th, 2014 on the internals list. As of today, no action (apart from Dimitri verifying the bug back in May 2014). There continues to be locking that perhaps only works by accident around query IDs.Soon, this bug will be two years old.
  • Endian code based on CPU type rather than endian define (bug #72715)
    About six-hundred and fifty days ago I filed this bug – back in May 2014, which probably has a relatively trivial fix of using the correct #ifdef of BIG_ENDIAN/LITTLE_ENDIAN rather than doing specific behavior based on #ifdef __i386__
    What’s worse is that this looks like somebody being clever for a compiler in the 1990s, which unlikely ends up with the most optimal code today.
  • mysql-test-run.pl –valgrind-all does not run all binaries under valgrind (bug #74830)
    Yeah, this should be a trivial fix, but nothing has happened since November 2014.
    I’m unlikely to go provide a patch simply because it seems to take sooooo damn long to get anything merged.
  • MySQL 5.1 doesn’t build with Bison 3.0 (bug #77529)
    Probably of little consequence, unless you’re trying to build MySQL 5.1 on a linux distro released in the last couple of years. Fixed in Maria for a long time now.

Trivial patches:

  • Incorrect function name in DBUG_ENTER (bug #78133)
    Pull request number 25 on github – a trivial patch that is obviously correct, simply correcting some debug only string.
    So far, over 191 days with no action. If you can’t get trivial and obvious patches merged in about 2/3rds of a year, you’re not going to grow contributions. Nearly everybody coming to a project starts out with trivial patches, and if a long time contributor who will complain loudly on the internet (like I am here) if his trivial patches aren’t merged can’t get it in, what chance on earth does a newcomer have?
    In case you’re wondering, this is the patch:

    --- a/sql/rpl_rli_pdb.cc
+++ b/sql/rpl_rli_pdb.cc
@@ -470,7 +470,7 @@ bool Slave_worker::read_info(Rpl_info_handler *from)
 
 bool Slave_worker::write_info(Rpl_info_handler *to)
 {
-  DBUG_ENTER("Master_info::write_info");
+  DBUG_ENTER("Slave_worker::write_info");
  • InnoDB table flags in bitfield is non-optimal (bug #74831)
    With a patch since I filed this back in November 2014, it’s managed to sit idle long enough for GCC 4.8 to practically disappear from anywhere I care about, and 4.9 makes better optimization decisions. There are other reasons why C bitfields are an awful idea too.

Actually complex issues:

  • InnoDB mutex spin loop is missing GCC barrier (bug #72755)
    Again, another bug filed back in May 2014, where InnoDB is doing a rather weird trick to attempt to get the compiler to not optimize away a spinloop. There’s a known good way of doing this, it’s called a compiler barrier. I’ve had a patch for nearly two years, not merged :(
  • buf_block_align relies on random timeouts, volatile rather than memory barriers (bug #74775)
    This bug was first filed in November 2014 and deals with a couple of incorrect assumptions about memory ordering and what volatile means.
    While this may only exhibit a problem on ARM and POWER processors (as well as any other relaxed memory ordering architectures, x86 is the notable exception), it’s clearly incorrect and very non-portable.
    Don’t expect MySQL 5.7 to work properly on ARM (or POWER). Try this:

    ./mysql-test-run.pl rpl.rpl_checksum_cache --repeat=10

    You’ll likely find MySQL > 5.7.5 still explodes.
    In fact, there’s also Bug #79378 which Alexey Kopytov filed with patch that’s been sitting idle since November 2015 which is likely related to this bug.

Not covered here: universal CRC32 hardware acceleration (rather than just for innodb data pages) and other locking issues (some only recently discovered). I also didn’t go into anything filed in December 2015… although in any other project I’d expect something filed in December 2015 to have been looked at by now.

Like it or not, MySQL is still upstream for all the MySQL derivatives active today. Maybe this will change as RocksDB and TokuDB gain users and if WebScaleSQL, MariaDB and Percona can foster a better development community.

My linux.conf.au 2016 talk “Adventures in OpenPower Firmware” is up!

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Thanks to the absolutely amazing efforts of the LCA video team, they’ve already (only a few days after I gave it) got the video from my linux.conf.au 2016 talk up!

Abstract

In mid 2014, IBM released the first POWER8 based systems with the new Free and Open Source OPAL firmware. Since then, several members of the OpenPower foundation have produced (or are currently producing) machines based on the POWER8 processor with the OPAL firmware.

This talk will cover the POWER8 chip with an open source firmware stack and how it all fits together.

We will walk through all of the firmware components and what they do, including the boot sequence from power being applied up to booting an operating system.

We’ll delve into:
– the time before you have RAM
– the time before you have thermal management
– the time before you have PCI
– runtime processor diagnostics and repair
– the bootloader (and extending it)
– building and flashing your own firmware
– using a simulator instead
– the firmware interface that Linux talks to
– device tree and OPAL calls
– fun in firmware QA and testing

View

Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=a4XGvssR-ag

Download (webm): http://mirror.linux.org.au/linux.conf.au/2016/03_Wednesday/Costa_Hall/Adventures_in_OpenPower_Firmware.webm

linux.conf.au 2016 Kernel miniconf CFP

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Why yes, it’s another long URL thanks to Google Docs: https://docs.google.com/forms/d/148SieC6vmAxJZ3R5Lz5e1Mb0IM06LNSCt6WNVEwYFcs/viewform

Got a kernel topic you want to talk about? Got a kernel topic you want to start discussion on? Or a Q&A? Submit NOW! We’re going for part sessions, part unconference.

Questions? Contact me at stewart@linux.vnet.ibm.com

POWER8 Accelerated CRC32 merged in MariaDB 10.1

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Earlier on in benchmarking MySQL and MariaDB on POWER8, we noticed that on write workloads (or read workloads involving a lot of IO) we were spending a bunch of time computing InnoDB page checksums. This is a relatively well known MySQL problem and has existed for many years and Percona even added innodb_fast_checksum to Percona Server to help alleviate the problem.

In MySQL 5.6, we got the ability to use CRC32 checksums, which are great in that they’re a lot faster to compute than tho old InnoDB “new” checksum. There’s code inside InnoDB to use the x86 SSE2 crc32q instruction to accelerate performing the checksum on compatible x86 CPUs (although oddly enough, the CRC32 checksum in the binlog does not use this acceleration).

However, on POWER, we’d end up using the software implementation of CRC32, which used a lot more CPU than we’d like. Luckily, CRC32 is really common code and for POWER8, we got some handy instructions to help computing it. Unfortunately, this required brushing up on vector polynomial math in order to understand how to do it all quickly. The end result was Anton coming up with crc32-vpmsum code that we could drop into projects that embed a copy of crc32 that was about 41 times faster than the best non-vpmsum implementation.

Recently, Daniel Black took the patch that had passed through both Daniel Axten‘s and my hands and worked on upstreaming it into MariaDB and MySQL. We did some pretty solid benchmarking on the improvement you’d get, and we pretty much cannot notice the difference between innodb_checksum=off and having it use the POWER8 accelerated CRC32 checksum, which frees up maybe 30% of CPU time to be used for things like query execution! My original benchmark showed a 30% improvement in sysbench read/write workloads.

The excellent news? Two days ago, MariaDB merged POWER8 accelerated crc32! This means that IO heavy workloads on MariaDB on POWER8 will get much faster in the next release.

MySQL bug 74776 is open, with patch attached, so hopefully MySQL will merge this soon too (hint hint).

An update on using Tor on Android

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Back in 2012 I wrote a blog post on using Tor on Android which has proved quite popular over the years.

These days, there is the OrFox browser, which is from The Tor Project and is likely the current best way to browse the web through Tor on your Android device.

If you’re still using the custom setup Firefox, I’d recommend giving OrFox a try – it’s been working quite well for me.