HP puts VT Flag in OS Security

At work we have an HP dc5750 machine that we want to put some HVM VMs on. The processor in the machine is an AMD 4450B that technically supports AMD-V. After installing Xen and booting the machine we found that HVM was not enabled in Xen so we had to go digging around. We looked through all the sensible BIOS options a few times and upgraded the BIOS to the latest version and then finally in frustration looked in the OS Security section and there it was - Virtualization was Disabled.

Awesome is understatement

Here's something geeky: See's Awesome Nut & Chew Bar. Wowsers those are good - why aren't they available in stores?

indirection and perf

This recent post by Phil Windley had a great paragraph in it about indirection and performance.

You know the saying “there’s no Computer Science problem that can’t be solved with a layer of indirection.” In homage to that, our solution is to redirect from a static URL to the timestamped filename. That’s not ideal, but it works. The downside is the other half of that homily: “there’s no performance problem that can’t be solved by eliminating a layer of indirection.” Still, our measurements show that the price we’re paying isn’t too high.

Good stuff. We all know it - he just has an amusing way of saying it.