So, it looks like I will be a guinea pig for a new KVM virtual machine to supplant my current LVM one (a pity really as I quite approve of the LVM design); KVM being virtualization at the processor level for the newest generation of AMD and Intel processors. Presumably this should make better use of the processors virtual addressing hardware and so improve performance. LVM is a clever hack that runs at a much higher level as an ordinary user space programme on a linux kernel with only a smattering of kernel support and no processor support at all. It was hatched at a time when 386 style processors couldn’t virtualize themselves (i.e. before a year ago). The 386 processors really are an awful design. All IBM processors have been self virtualizable for 40 years at least. Every other processor contemporary with the 386 that were complex enough to incorporate virtual addressing hardware have been otherwise simple enough to self-virtualize. But the 386 is such a baroque mess that it has stood alone in preserving 1970s microprocessor limitations into the third millenium. This is the only CPU that makes the rest of the PC design look good in comparison. Intel processors, PC computers and Windows operating systems. They are well matched in how awful they are. You have to wonder what computers would be like today if the best designs had flourished instead of the worst.

Comments

Sat, 2009/04/18 - 1:11am — webmaster

Comment Spam

No more spam please. I’m full. I think I might just just turn comments off entirely. I can’t really understand these people. I had set filtering for html tags for unmoderated comments but it still filled up with ineffective attempts to hyperlink. To deal with the junk I added an approval queue but that still piles up with garbage. I thought if nothing was published they would learn and go away — but that doesn’t seem to work either.