intel

Intel X710 NICs Are Crap

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(I’m grumpy this week and I’m giving myself permission to return to my blogging roots and complain about stuff. Deal with it.) In the not so distant past we were growing a VMware cluster and ordered 17 new blade servers with X710 NICs. Bad idea. X710 NICs suck, as it turns out. Those NICs do all sorts of offloads, and the onboard processor intercepts things like CDP and LLDP packets so that the OS cannot see or participate. That’s a real problem for ESXi hosts where you want to listen for and broadcast meaningful neighbor advertisements. Under Linux you can echo a bunch of crap into the right spot in /dev and shut that off but no such luck on …

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Should We Panic About the KPTI/KAISER Intel CPU Design Flaw?

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As a followup to yesterday’s post, I’ve been asked: should we panic about the KPTI/KAISER/F*CKWIT Intel CPU design flaw? My answer was: it depends on a lot of unknowns. There are NDAs around a lot of the fixes so it’s hard to know the scope and effect. We also don’t know how much this will affect particular workloads. The folks over at Sophos have a nice writeup today about the actual problem (link below) but in short, the fix will reduce the effectiveness of the CPU’s speculative execution and on-die caches, forcing it to go out to main memory more. Main memory (what we call RAM) is 20x slower than the CPU’s L2 cache (look below for a good link showing …

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Intel CPU Design Flaw, Performance Degradation, Security Updates

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I was just taking a break and reading some tech news and I saw a wonderfully detailed post from El Reg (link below) about an Intel CPU design flaw and impending crisis-level security updates to fix it. As if that wasn’t bad enough, the fix for the problem is estimated to decrease performance by 5% to 30%, with older systems being the hardest hit. Welcome to 2018, folks. In short, an Intel CPU tries to keep itself busy by speculating about what it’s going to need to work on next. On Intel CPUs (but not AMD) this speculative execution doesn’t properly respect the security boundaries between the OS kernel and userspace applications, so you can trick an Intel processor into letting …

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Intel’s Memory Drive Implementation for Optane Guarantees its Doom

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A few weeks ago Intel started releasing their Optane product, a commercialization of the 3D Xpoint (Crosspoint) technology they’ve been talking about for a few years. Predictably, there has been a lot of commentary in all directions. Did you know it’s game changing, or that it’s a solution looking for a problem? It’s storage. It isn’t storage. It’s RAM. It isn’t RAM. It’s too slow to be RAM. It’s too small for storage. It’s useful now. Nobody will use it for years. Yup. Confusion. It’s because Optane is a bunch of different things. It’s consumer and enterprise, and it’s both storage and memory. There are plenty of articles out there on the technology itself. There’s a small M.2 version for desktops …

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VMware vSphere 5.5 & Dell 12G Servers: Reliable Memory Technology

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A few days ago Dell released BIOS updates for their 12th generation servers. Among all the notes about preparations for the Intel E5-2600 v2 refresh there’s one line that’s of interest to those of us thinking about running vSphere 5.5 on our version 1 12G hardware: New Memory Operating Mode setup option ‘Dell Fault Resilient Mode’ This is a patented new technology from Dell, wherein the hypervisor and system hardware can work together to place the hypervisor in a more redundant section of memory. Dell servers have shipped with a variety of tricks to protect against memory faults, things like Memory Page Retire, which will dynamically remove a page from usable memory space if it encounters an error. However, to …

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Dell PowerEdge 12G Is Here

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Over the last week there’s been a number of different posts about the new Dell PowerEdge models, the 12th generation (12G) of their server line. I was briefed both by Dell technical staff and by Dell executive staff on the Rx20 lineup and I took a few notes. I was mainly briefed about the Dell PowerEdge R620, R720, R720xd, which will be in the first wave of refreshes. The higher-end models, like the R820 and R920, and the cloud & HPC focused C-series, will be part of another release soon after, and reach into the higher-end E7 CPU models (8 way, 10 cores) from Intel. The new mid-range hosts are built around the Intel Xeon E5 CPUs, also known as …

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How to Fix Google Chrome Font Rendering Issues

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I’ve been having a heck of a time with terrible font rendering in Chrome. In fact, it’s been my biggest complaint about that browser. I get fonts with missing pieces, fonts that don’t render completely, text that is completely absent, and text with severely pixelated edges. I don’t mean to be a snob about it, but I look at this thing many hours every day, and I’d like it to work right. Here’s a severe example. The image on the left is what I saw in Chrome, and the image on the right is what I should have seen when visiting a particular web site:         That’s like WTF levels of crappy, right? It was happening all the time, on …

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