Recording of my LCA2017 talk: Organizational Change: Challenges in shipping open source firmware
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Category Archives: Talks
Books referenced in my Organizational Change talk at LCA2017
All of these are available as Kindle books, but I’m sure you can get 3D copies too:
The Five Dysfunctions of a Team: A Leadership Fable by Patrick M. Lencioni
Leading Change by John P. Kotter
Who Says Elephants Can’t Dance? Louis V. Gerstner Jr.
Nonviolent Communication: A language of Life by Marshall B. Rosenberg and Arun Gandhi
Video of my Percona Live Talk: Why would I run MySQL/MariaDB on POWER anyway?
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.
My linux.conf.au 2016 talk “Adventures in OpenPower Firmware” is up!
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
My lca2014 talk video: Past, Present and Future of MySQL and variants
On last Wednesday morning I gave my talk at linux.conf.au 2014. You can now view and download the recording of it here:
(hopefully more free formats will come soon, the all volunteer AV team has been absolutely amazing getting things up this quickly).
Speaking at OSDC 2013 in Auckland!
I’ll be speaking at the upcoming OSDC conference in Auckland, New Zealand! It’s on October 21st-23rd and you should go here right now and register. I’m giving two talks at OSDC this year:
- MySQL in the cloud, As A Service (Monday 21st, 12:00pm)
There is no one magic solution to having MySQL As A Service work well, it’s a lot of small moving parts and options that need to be set, monitored and configured. We may wish it was different, or look at other database technologies, but there is a lot of legacy code that talks to MySQL, with all it’s idiosyncrasies – and we need to be able to support this code. In this talk, we’ll cover many of the problem areas and what you can do to avoid them. - The Agony and Ecstasy of Continuous Integration (Wednesday 23rd, 2:30pm)
This a tale of the introduction of continuous integration testing into a well established development team. It covers both the highs and lows and discusses strategies to deal with both the positives and negatives and in turn improve your own software engineering practices.
In case you need to quickly justify to your boss why you should go to OSDC, the conference organisers have helpfully provided a page of hints on just that subject.
HOWTO: Build a Monorail
At linux.conf.au 2012 I gave a lightning talk on our Burning man 2010 art installation the Nowhere2Nowhere monorail. I finally extracted the video of just my lightning talk and threw it up on youtube for easy viewing:
Sessions at the Percona Live MySQL Conference that interest me
For the past many years, there’s been a conference in April, at the Santa Clara Convention Centre where the topic has been MySQL and the surrounding ecosystem. The first year I went, I gave a talk on the new features in MySQL Cluster 5.1 to a overflowing room of attendees. For me, it’s an event that’s mixed with speaking about something I’ve been working on and talking to other attendees about everything from how a particular part of the server works to where we can escape to for nearby good vegan food.
So, I thought I’d share some of the sessions that I’m really looking forward to. My selection is probably atypical, but may be interesting to others. I’m not going to list the keynotes, although they are often of a lot of value. I’m also going to attempt to avoid listing a few really awesome well known speakers simply because there are other really interesting sessions that also need exposure!
- Starring Sakila: Building Data Warehouses and BI solutions using MySQL and Pentaho
I need to base decisions off data, not simply a gut feeling (I’m not Stephen Colbert after all). I ran into a bunch of stumbling blocks when trying to work with Pentaho a couple of weeks ago, and I’m really hoping that this session shines some light on how to use it to better and more easily make arguments based on evidence to others in the company. - Testing MySQL Databases: The State Of The Art
I’ve worked with Patrick for several years now, and he’s currently a valuable member of my team at Percona. For those who are interested in the state of the art of open source database testing, this is the session to be in. - Getting InnoDB Compression Ready for Facebook Scale
This session is on at the same time as I’m speaking, so I probably won’t be able to attend (people keep coming to my sessions so I usually can’t sneak out). I’m really interested in how they’ve modified the compression code to help with their (large) workload. - Backing Up Facebook
I hear that Facebook has a couple of database servers, a few dozen users and a few floppy disks full of data. This should be a fun story :) - Introducing XtraBackup Manager
Being responsible for XtraBackup development at Percona, the XtraBackup topics really interest me. Lachlan has been working on a simple backup manager for XtraBackup to help create something that is a more complete backup solution than a tool which simply creates a backup. - Extending Xtrabackup – A Point-In-Time System
Another good case of using XtraBackup as part of a comprehensive backup strategy. I have to be honest, I’m looking for ways in which we can improve XtraBackup to better fit the needs of people. It may be that there are a few small things we can do to make it easier for people do deploy and use. - Getting Started with Drizzle 7.1
We’re about to do the 7.1 release of Drizzle! If you’re interested in having a SQL database that is designed to be used in large scale web applications and cloud environments, come along to this talk. - MySQL Idiosyncrasies That Bite
I have to admit, I’m interested in Ronalds talk here to basically ensure we didn’t miss fixing anything in Drizzle. I do promise not to at any point yell out “Fixed in Drizzle” though.
Go here to register:Â http://www.percona.com/live/mysql-conference-2012/Â (early bird pricing and discounted hotel rooms end March 12th, so you want to register sooner rather than later).
Speaking at Percona Live London 2011 (on Drizzle!)
Both Henrik and myself will be at Percona Live London 2011 in late October speaking on the wonderful Drizzle database server.
Other speakers at the conference will be talking about a wide range of topics surrounding the MySQL ecosystem including performance monitoring, backup, search, scaling and data recovery.
P.S. I do have a discount code – ask me in the comments for it!
Speaking at OSCON
OSCON is coming up again: July 25th-29th in wonderful Portland, OR. If you come to OSCON, not only will you be at OSCON, but you’ll be in Portland in July – which is just lovely. We’ll also have other people from Percona there and it should be a great lot of fun.
So come along and talk interesting technology – I’ll be speaking on “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World“. If you know my love of reliable software with known failure modes, you’ll probably enjoy this one – especially if you saw my “Eat My Data: How everybody gets POSIX file I/O Wrong” which when given at OSCON 2008 was given to a packed room with people in the aisles and out the door.
Speaking has its pluses and minuses of course. It takes a very, very long time to construct a good talk (I would guess 12hrs for each hour of speaking) and you do miss out on some other sessions (preparing, going over, final touches, rehearsals). It is rather rewarding though, and sparks very interesting conversations afterwards.
I should also mention, if you want 20% off OSCON rego: use os11fos as discount code.
Speaking on Tuesday: HailDB and Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World
I’m giving two talks tomorrow (Tuesday) at the MySQL Conference and Expo:
HailDB: A NoSQL API direct to InnoDB, 2:00pm, Ballroom D
Dropping ACID: Eating Data In A Web 2.0 Cloud World 3:05pm, Ballroom G
The HailDB talk is all about a C API to embed an InnoDB based relational database engine into your application. Awesome stuff (also nice and technical).
The second talk, “Dropping ACID: Eating Data in a Web 2.0 Cloud World” is not only a joke that only database people get, but a humorous and serious look at data integrity and reliability as promised by the current hype. This was quite well received at linux.conf.au in January. So, if you weren’t in Australia in January this year, then certainly come along and see how you go heckling an Australian.
Drizzle @ Velocity (seemed to go well)
Monty’s talk at Velocity 2010 seemed to go down really well (at least from reading the agile admin entry on Drizzle). There are a few great bits from this article that just made me laugh:
“Oracle’s “run Java within the database†is an example of totally retarded functionality whose main job is to ruin your life”
Love it that we’re managing to get the message out.
Interesting Videos from the MySQL Conference and Expo
There’s a good number of videos appearing online from the MySQL Conference and Expo that was on last week.
Here’s a short list of interesting things to look at if you weren’t able to make the sessions. Obviously, this is from my view as a Drizzle developer. There were other interesting things, but this list is more focused towards where my Drizzle brain is stimulated.
Feedback from MySQL Cluster tutorial
Way back on Monday (at the MySQL Conference and Expo), I gave a full day tutorial on MySQL Cluster. I awoke early in the morning to a “oh ha ha” URL in an IM; but no, it wasn’t jetlag playing tricks with me. Luckily, this didn’t take much (if anything) away from the purpose of the day: teaching people about NDB.
Distracting-and-this-time-really-annoying-thing-of-the-day-2: It seems that O’Reilly had cut back on power this year, and there were no power boards in the room. A full day interactive tutorial, and nowhere to plug in laptops. Hrrm.. Luckily, having over the many years I’ve been speaking at this event, I’ve gotten to know the AV guys okay, and asked them. They totally deserve a medal. Tutorial started at 8:30, I noticed at 7:30, and it was all fixed by 7:45. The front half of the room (enough for everyone coming) had enough power for everyone. It was quite okay to bunch everybody up – means I have to run around less.
This years tutorial was modified from last year (and that does take time, even though I’ve given it many times before). I wanted to remove out of date things, trim bits down (to better fit into the time we have, based on more experience on how long it takes to get interactive parts done) and add a bit.
When we got to the end of the day (yes, I ran over… and everybody stayed, so either I’m really scary or the material is really interesting) I pleaded for feedback. It’s amazingly scary doing an interactive tutorial. You’re placing the success of the session not so much on you, but on everyone who’s come to it.
Sometimes I’ve gotten not much feedback at all; this time was different. I spoke to a number of people afterwards (and some via email) and got some really good suggestions for small changes that would have greatly enhanced the day for them. I was pleased that they also really enjoyed the tutorial and liked the interactivity. I (and it seems a great many others) do not much like tutorials that are just long talks.
People walked out of my tutorial with a good overview of what MySQL Cluster was, how to set one up, use one, do a bit of admin and some of how it works.
I even dragged Jonas up to explain in great detail the 2 phase commit protocol for transactions. Of course, this is detail you don’t ever need to know to deploy – but people are intersted in internals.
So far the session has received an average of 4 stars in evaluations (four five star, two four star and one two star). I’d be really interested in feedback from the person who gave two stars, as this may mean I missed getting something done for them (e.g. providing information, help etc). Even though it is hard to spread yourself around a room of 60-ish-plus people, I do like to do it well. There is the other possibility of people not coming prepared, which will mean they may be bored for a lot of the day if they don’t jump in with another group and help learn that way.
So, I’m rather happy with how my first session went.
MySQL Cluster Tutorial
This year I am again giving a MySQL Cluster Tutorial at the MySQL Conference and Expo. As those who have attended before can tell you, this is a hands on tutorial. I don’t just stand up the front and talk at you for a day, that would be very boring (for all of us). While there is a good amount of presented material (there is a decent amount of theory to get through), there is a large component that involves setting up a cluster, putting data in, getting data out, backup, restore.
So if you’re wanting to learn about MySQL Cluster in a nice and friendly hands-on environment, I can recommend coming to my tutorial.
The tutorial isn’t the be-all and end-all tutorial. It does not teach you everything. It does give you a decent introduction though.
eHorizons
I flew back into Sydney on Sunday morning to give a tutorial at Sun’s Expanding Horizon’s summit. It was a half day tutorial on MySQL Cluster – so a shortened version of the one I’ve given at the MySQL User Conference for the past few years. I had about 15 attendees, all of which had done their homework (It probably help that they were pestered via phone :)
The tutorial went really well. It really helps when everybody has done the homework and already have Linux and MySQL Cluster installed. Everybody got up and running (we used mysql-test-run to start a cluster, not writing the config file from scratch, which made things happen a lot faster). Also got some good feedback – yay! We may even have some people look to deploy it after attending, always a plus.
I also gave a “Scaling MySQL” talk that was well attended. I didn’t talk at all about query optimisation, mysqld configuration tuning or stuff like that – instead focusing on making the app saner, caching etc. memcached, of course, got a good mention :) It seemed to go down well, some good questions, and a rather full room.
So a rather productive two days for spreading the freedom love.
However, the conference dinner was complete FAIL on account of the venue. I don’t know which vegetarians/vegans call beef and fish vegetarian, but I’ve never met one (hint: they don’t exist). This is *after* the explanation on being vegan. Then… there was some discussion about pasta with a tomato/vegetable sauce, never came. So as others were finishing meals, again inquire – eventually, something was brought over. Undercooked rice and undercooked steamed vegetables. I don’t know who eats that for dinner (hint: nobody). Of course, after the pasta discussion, I then selected a wine that would go with it. After more of the stuff-ups, I pointed out that there was no way I was going to pay for the wine when shit like that was served (yes, in those words… perhaps I’ve been watching too much Gordon Ramsay).
It was the first time ever that I’ve left a restaurant during a function, gone down the street, gotten take away and brought it back. Novotel Brighton Beach (in Sydney) – you suck.
(there’s also a beutiful view across the bay of the runways of Sydney airport… which is fine if you can sleep through planes landing an taking off, like i can, but i know others can’t).
Will never stay at the Novotel Brighton Beach voluntarily, ever. On the plus side, the guy at the desk when checking out was very apologetic…
Speaking at Sun Extended Horizons Summit 2008
Sun Microsystems – Australia – APAC Extended Horizons Summit 2008
I’m giving a Cluster session tomorrow (Sunday) and talking about Scaling MySQL on Monday. Hope to see you there!
Coming to the end of OSDC
Sitting in the last lightning talk session of OSDC2007 and in a couple of hours will be (surprise) jumping on a plane back home.
Has been a good and interesting conference. Met cool people, done cool hacking and chatting around the place.
Gave my talk today, and seemed to go down well…. at least Paul Fenwick liked it :)
libeatmydata
Following my successful linux.conf.au talk “Eat My Data: How Everybody Gets POSIX File I/O Wrong“, I started to feel the need to easily be able to have my data eaten.
Okay, not quite. However, when you’ve written your software properly, so it uses fsync() correctly, opening files with O_SYNC or whatever – tests take longer as you’re having to wait for things to hit the rust.
So….. LD_PRELOAD=libeatmydata.so to the rescue! With a POSIX compliant fsync() (that does nothing) and filtering on open(2), it can take your test run times down dramatically.
The only time you shouldn’t use it for your tests is when you end up crashing the machine to test durability (i.e. when the OS doesn’t have the opportunity to cleanly write out the data to disk).
See the libeatmydata project page: http://www.flamingspork.com/projects/libeatmydata/
and the bazaar repository: http://www.flamingspork.com/src/libeatmydata
(it’s seemed to have saved somewhere between 20 and 30% of the time for innodb/ndb tests in mysql-test-run).
A Googly MySQL Cluster Talk – Google Video
A Googly MySQL Cluster Talk – Google Video
The talk I gave at Google is now up on Google Video for all to see. I don’t think I gave it as well as I did at the User Conference (largely because, I think, by this time I was really tired), but it still went well (I think).
Feedback is much appreciated – always looking for ways to improve my talks.
Oh, I’m also wearing an Augie March t-shirt.
Update: watching yourself give a presentation is a bit strange… but hopefully I can learn from watching my own talk.
Things I’ve learnt so far:
- some words are spoken a bit quickly/mumbly. probably due to not knowing how long this presentation would go for (it was a bit cobbled together in the two sessions before mine)
- I (for whatever reason) had nano instead of micro for SCI latency. Oh well, hopefully nobody will notice my mistake (apart from when i blogged it. eep)
- Make sure the mouse cursor on your slides is hidden/at the edge of the screen
- At least for google video resolution, small text can’t be read (see my Components of a Cluster slide, you can’t read the name of the processes – ndbd, mysqld, ndb_mgmd). Getting around this can be interesting for some slides – that are easily viewable on a projector, but not on the video. Doh.
- One possible solution is to “zoom” in on important text.
- For example, the “A Configuration” slide. When I talk about each config parameter, have it zoom up to a larger font size (on that big bit of white space on the right)
- I really do want to walk around a room. Having to stand in the one place for the video camera was nearly killing me :)
- This is interesting as for my UC presentation I was annoyed that I couldn’t get a wireless microphone. Instead I was getting tangled up in a microphone cord.
- I should possibly have some good slides on the split brain problem and a quick example of how we avoid it (and why you need at least three machines)
- I sometimes pronounce “server’ strangely.
- I should have a diagram that includes a magic load balancer box showing it load balancing between the mysql servers connected to the cluster.
- I should possibly have a clear diagram showing where you can do queries (UPDATE) on cluster (everywhere) versus with replication (only the master).
- I don’t think i should laugh when there’s something that I think is funny.
- Be more carefull about when I stop for a drink of water. Think about it. between slides can be good, but when there’s something up for people to look at… maybe the next topic (or something else exciting)
- I’m unsure if photos of scantily clad models are suitable here… :)
- For “find out more” – have screenshots of the various things (and a photo of the book)
- Need a clear definition of fragment.
- I need to pronounce ‘configurable’ more clearly.
- a laser pointer is not visible on google video
That’s all i wrote down while watching it. other input welcome