coulomb

[Thomas Schwinge]

Hi!

It is with sadness that I have to report the demise of coulomb, the
system powered by an AMD Athlon XP with 1466 MHz, that has long been
serving my GNU Hurd development needs.  In the night from Tuesday to
Wednesday, working on tracking down the
<http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/open_issues/cannot_create__dev_null__interrupted_system_call.html>
issue, its venerable K7VTA3 2.0a mainboard, about as old as the current
millennium, now appears to have bought the farm, and resists to be
revived, having tried with three different ATX power supplies.

Of course, this system was long obsolete, but opposed to a solution based
on a virtual machine, it had the advantage that it had a well-defined
timing behavior, so I used it to track that we don't get whole-system
performance regressions when performing certain tasks, such as building
GCC, by just measuring wall time.  As it was based on real hardware, it
allowed for simply plugging in stuff, and see whether that works.  Alas,
this era now seems to be over, and I'll be moving the little development
that I do into a virtual machine; Xen can measure whole-system domU CPU
usage, I think -- not sure about KVM.


Grüße,
 Thomas

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