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What is glAccum ? The opengl function - glAccum operate on the accumulation buffer.
This function provides support for many special effects .
Today I simulated the effect of motion blur with this function.
See picture below:

Here is a copy of the MAC shared library for Vdbench 5.02. Download this file and place it in your /vdbench502/mac/ directory.

Henk.

Yesterday I came back from Cologne, where I stayed a night at Enrico’s before taking the train back to Münster. After I arrived home, my customers kept me busy, but now I have some time to blog about the Chemnitzer Linux-Tage (Chemnitz Linux Days) last weekend.

Let’s start from the beginning: On Friday I took the train to Dortmund where I met Bert, Yakoov and Gregory. Bert gave me a ride to Chemnitz. When we checked in at our hotel, we met Jörg, but he was in a hurry to get back to his parents, who live not far away from Chemnitz. After the check-in we met with Sven and his friends at the Ratskeller to have some delicious food. Thorsten called me and showed up just a little later and half an hour later the Xfce people arrived too. While I already knew most of them because I met Enrico last year at OpenRheinRuhr and Dominik, Michael and Simon happen to be Fedora contributors too, I was very pleased to meet Fabian Nowak. I know him for quite a long time, but we never met in person.

After finishing our meals we walked over to the Turmbrauhaus (Tower brewery) for some beers. There were quite a lot of people from different projects there, CentOS, Debian and the FSF just to name a few. They all were sitting around a really long table, chatting, drinking and having fun. In another room Jörg Schilling had dinner with two lawyers friends.

The next morning we arrived at the university where the CLT takes place. Robert and Jörg already build up the booth on Friday, so there was not much left for us to do. I decided to have breakfast first. The catering at CLT is really impressive, people even call it the “Chemnitz Catering Days with Linux talks”.

The Fedora booth at CLT 2010

The Fedora booth was pretty busy all day, so I didn’t manage to attend any talks or help the at the Xfce booth. I talked all day long, it was loud and crowded, and in the evening at the social event I nearly lost my voice. The problem was that I had to give my LXDE talk on Sunday. So I left the social event early and got back to the hotel with Jens to cure my voice.

On Sunday I was much better again. Although speaking loud was exhausting, I managed to do my talk and it seems people really liked it. After the talk a lot of the visitors came up to the Fedora booth in order to get the Fedora LXDE spin on a USB key. Next year we should also do an Xfce talk to gather more attraction.

After the first round of people was served with USB keys and live media, I burned some Xfce media and headed over to the Xfce booth. I felt really bad because I could not spend that much time on Xfce, but I know that they had enough people to do well. Nevertheless I would have liked to spend more time with Enrico, Fabian and the people from the Fedora Xfce SIG.

Later that afternoon I had to repair the display connector of the Fedora video beamer and I needed a tong. Instead of asking all kinds of people for a tong I went straight to the debianforum.de booth and of course, they had what I was looking for. Debianforum.de never disappoints you! It was also nice to meet the guys from Debianforum.de again. The first time I met Sebastian in person was last year at Chemnitz and I owe him and his forum so much.

Another person that I was happy to meet is Sirko. Last year he was part of the CLT organization team, but they had some disagreements. I cannot comment on that, I was just lucky to see Sirko again.

As you can see: Chemnitz Linux Days are a place to meet the German Linux community. I even think it is the best Linux community event in Germany. I enjoyed it last year, I enjoyed it this year and I will definitely go there again next year:

But there were also two I did not like:

• Simon’s talk about the security spin was rejected although it would have fitted perfectly into the forensics track.
• The German Federal Foreign Office, because they rejected Hiemanschu’s visa for no reason. It would have been awesome to have Hiemanschu at the event because then the three people involved in the F13 security spin (Jörg, Hiemanschu and me) would have been gathered at one place.

Anyway, there is nothing we can do about these problems, so let’s focus on the positive things. For me the two most important thing are

• Fedora had a very strong presence at CLT: If you count in all the people (even the ones not doing official booth service or the ones serving at the Xfce booth), we were 12 Fedora contributors (in alphabetical order): Bert, Christoph (myself), Dominik, Gregory, Jens, Jörg, Marcus, Michael, Simon, Sven, Thorsten,  and Yakoov.

The Xfce community at CLT 2010

• The large number of Fedora contributors at the Xfce booth also proves that we are doing a good job with the Xfce SIG. The number of Xfce users in Fedora is growing and so is the number of Fedora users in the Xfce community, for example in the IRC channels. I’m looking forward to Xfce 4.8 because I’m sure the new release will help us to make Xfce even more attractive.

Looking forward to rock Chemnitz next year with Fedora and Xfce. Maybe we will even haven an LXDE booth, who knows?

Just because it made me smile.


“I would say Fedora is the father to RHEL.” Paul Frields: “And the son has an incredibly lucrative job.”

It is a great way to look at things.

Since MIX10 is still under way, we're going to have quite a few Microsoft items this week, with Windows Phone 7 Series and Internet Explorer 9 being the main points of focus. We've been speculating a while now about if and how Microsoft would support multitasking on their upcoming mobile operating system reboot, and now we finally have answers: no, it won't do multitasking - at least, not right away.

It was time for a face lift. And here it is: the relaunch of my virtual UX blog at Oracle.

Marketing FAD, Day 4: We’re going to be doing lots of videotaping today. Actually, I guess it’s probably not called videotaping these days; I wonder if people have started referring to it as “video-disking” or some such thing. We’ve got plans to pull together content for an F13-specific video, some along the lines of a “friends” video / individual profile highlight movie, and then, what we’re hoping will be… a more timeless video on “What is Fedora.”

One of the recurring themes that we’ve been discussing is how people outside the community – who are potential contributors, or even, potential users – perceive Fedora.  How would they describe it, in one word?

Turns out that asking people for just One Word is not a simple task.  We posted two large white sheets here on the Red Hat campus in the elevators of the building we’re in, with accompanying markers, and wrote, “What word do you think of when you think of Fedora?”

Hours later, we went to the elevator and discovered…. that people apparently don’t like brainstorming in elevators, because the pieces of paper were GONE, without a trace.  And the markers!

And so, in the hopes of gathering other results, I conducted a highly scientific poll of a group of friends I have on a mailing list. (By highly scientific, I mean a pool of sysadmins, programmer-types, geeks, tinkerers, experimenters, and awesomeness in general… mostly male, about 30 people…. realllllly scientific. I hope the readers are gathering my sarcasm here.)  To be a little more serious, though, most of these people are people who have used Fedora at some point, are familiar with multiple Linux distros, and in some cases, are more than just casually familiar with the Open Source Way.

The results were — and continue to be — interesting, surprising, and more than one word.  I originally asked for one word, and people started saying, “oops, that was a sentence….” — and eventually it evolved into me saying, “Okay, just dump your thoughts on me.”

One-word (or, “few word,” answers) –

Feature rich.  Green. Bleeding edge.  Unstable. “Yum”…ish. “Pain. Physical and emotional.” Fat. Incubator. Indy.

Another thing I discovered is that a lot of people have used Fedora — Many, Many years ago.  And that is their last impression of Fedora — and despite the fact that, obviously, Fedora (and other distros) has made significant improvements over the several years, they’re not interested in coming back.

This was my experience too (extensive RPM troubles) as a linux user.
I suppose I had one RPM difficulty as a linux administrator as well,
though the source was not RH (it was the annoying people @ Plesk).  I
was happy to settle on Ubuntu in 2005.  My last RH was RHEL 5.  Can’t
remember the version number of my last Fedora.

At least some people recognize that what’s gone on between now and then has probably changed things…

I don’t know how to describe fedora anymore because it wouldn’t be
fair. The last time I tried RHEL was 4 years ago, and fedora maybe 1
year before that.

last time I dealt with it was like release 8 or 9 and thinking ZOMG, 6
CDs…6!?!

And yeah.. I’ve recommended Ubuntu desktop for some of my friends
that are totally sick of Windows.  The feedback I’ve been getting
has been along the lines of “wow, why didn’t I do this years ago?”

The Ubuntu desktop gui environment is really quite nice.  Install
is super easy as well.  You don’t have to be a Linux-pro to move
around in it, do updates, copy files, install new hardware, etc..

That being said, I would never use Ubuntu as a server platform…

Sometimes, just HAVING the discussion does some good….

Ubuntu has the momentum and word of mouth.  I don’t know much about Fedora and have not been motivated to try it because Ubuntu makes me happy.  That being said I am downloading it now to get a feel for it.

And other times, people just get it (more or less):

Personally I don’t do Fedora because of the short support lifecycle.
When I install a box, I don’t want to have to reinstall it 1-2 years
from now just to keep getting security updates and fixes.  So, I use
centos…   If I want a sneak peek at the tech that may make it into
rhel next year, I install the latest Fedora and play with it.
However, that’s what Fedora is for — I don’t think it is something
that needs fixed by extending Fedora’s support lifecycle.

You shouldn’t pick Fedora for imporant shit that matters to an
enterprise — it’s not what it is for.  Fedora is the leading/bleeding
edge proving grounds and development grounds for RedHat Enterprise
Linux (RHEL), which is the slower, more stable, more robust, longer
support life option that is designed for your super important shit
that matters to your enterprise.

IMO, the reason to use Fedora (in places where it is appropriate, like
in R&D situations or a desktop env) is if your enterprise systems are
running RHEL/CentOS and you want something that is familiar and
similar to what you know and use already, but you want newer stuff for
a particular situation.  Also, as an added bonus, anything new you
learn in Fedora may apply to future versions of RHEL/CentOS.   less
crap to learn and remember ftw.

So, yeah.  Lots of input.  I think the one thing that is clear is that people aren’t necessarily getting the message – or that they’ve started elsewhere, and will never even try Fedora, simply because they’re Happy now.  How can we convince them to make the switch — or try Fedora as their first, or try it again?

How about you? If you ask people at your local LUG meeting what the one word is that comes to mind when they think about Fedora, what are you hearing? How about in a paragraph or less?

Tagged: Fedora, ihavereallyawesomefriends, marketing, One Word, opinions

On day 2, Chris Grams of New Kind and John Adams and Jonathan Opp of Red Hat joined us to talk about growing and strengthening Fedora brand. They talked to us about the 10-plus year work that has gone into building Red Hat’s brand, and helped us find the right questions to ask about Fedora’s brand. The full log is probably more illuminating than quick notes on a complex topic. I also got a chance to take a look at the excellent book Designing Brand Identity, and did some reading in it overnight — enough to know I want to go get a copy of my own.

It seems like Fedora has been doing a good job of maintaining consistency in the way we present Fedora, and that our reliance on the same essential four foundations of freedom, friends, features and first can continue to serve us well into the future. We spent much of the rest of the day trying to flesh out our answers to the questions Chris, John, and Jonathan passed on as a good exercise.

Russell Harrison also took some wonderful head shots of some of the participants at the very tail end of the day. They turned out great and I can really see how much there is to learn as a novice photographer! Then we headed off to the Carolina Ale House for a fun dinner, followed by several hours of packaging introduction by the inimitable David Nalley (ke4qqq).

On day 3, we focused on PR and press-related content. Our guest speaker had a last-minute emergency and we rearranged some of our schedule. Henrik Heigl (wonderer), who’s an experienced press person himself, gave a fantastic presentation on press relations from the perspective of having a foot in both worlds. He’s helping to drive our work on a more modular, expressive, and useful press kit. Everyone worked on content for the kit, drafting up pages that we can shift in and out of such a kit over time and depending on where and to whom we’re giving it out.

Last night I had to hole up in my room to get some non-Marketing work done. Today we are pumped up for a day of video work with the awesome Red Hat Creative team. I’ll be leaving late this afternoon, bringing Neville Cross back to the airport to catch his plane back to Nicaragua, and then heading home.

If you're planning to be at CTIA this year, come check out Oracle's developer day.  Our exciting agenda promises to be heavy on demos and technology and you'll even get a chance to interact with the presenters 1:1 after their sessions.  On the agenda we have John Burkey, lead architect for JavaFX, who will be showing off latest and greatest developments in JavaFX and Hinkmond Wong will be presenting a session on Java ME as well.  In addition, there will be a number of other great topics on the agenda so register today!

One of my kids asked me yesterday why I hadn't updated my blog for almost a month, and while its no excuse, the last 30 days have been filled with nonstop learning about Oracle's products, meeting with customers, and just a bit of imagining the possibilities. One of the Oracle technologies I've spent a lot of time thinking about is Oracle Data Mining (ODM). In an odd twist of fate, both ODM and Sun can trace some of their lineage to the 1980's supercomputer company Thinking Machines.

When Thinking Machines went bankrupt in 1994, the hardware assets of the company and many of the employees were acquired by Sun Microsystems. What remained of Thinking Machines reformed as a data mining software company and developed the Darwin data mining toolkit. Then in 1999, the data mining business was purchased by Oracle and eventually became ODM.

ODM provides a broad suite of data mining techniques and algorithms to solve many types of business problems. including clssificaiton, regression, attribute importance, association, and feature extraction. There are of course many different data mining software packages in existence that could, for instance, determine the association between frequency of an employee's new blog entries and their number of days traveling in a month. Most of those tools would require you to extract records from a database, input them into the data mining package, run the analysis, and eventually probably store the results back into the database. Therein lies one of the unique advantages of ODM. Much of the data that large enterprises want to mine already exists in a database, so why not put the data mining algorithms into the database too, then you wouldn't have to move the data in order to mine it. That is exactly what Oracle did about a decade ago with ODM, and its been evolving ever since.

Today, perhaps the ultimate data mining platform is Oracle's Exadata Database Machine. Much has been written about Exadata's smart flash cache, its hybrid columnar compression, and its fully redundant QDR InfiniBand networking which, combined, make Exadata both a great data warehouse and a great OLTP platform. Add ODM, and Exadata becomes a great platform for such data mining applications as anomaly analysis for fraud analysis, clustering analysis for life sciences drug discovery, or association analysis for product bundling or in-store placement analysis.

You won't need a PhD in statistics to use ODM, but I would recommend the book Super Crunchers to get you started on imagining the possibilities.

There is not much in world what supports an very special language, like hungarian. But I always hope that I will met such sets like Libertine, that you could use not only free desktop publishing, else any purpose what you prefer.

After I have red that news the new Libertine set is released with new typographic modifications, specially targeted with some solved hungarian letter spacing problems, together with other small beauty repairs - what makes more usable at TeX environment too - made me very happy. This set hold 4 other types, and small capital type too, together with some letter equalisation, what means not just real levelling between letters (like in TeX: the Modern Computer set), else this is the first OpenType set what is usable perfectly with OpenOffice too. Such doesn't existed - until yet. The best is - the licence is GNU GPL and SIL OFL.

I really hope that will be packaged very soon.
Here is the zipped package and the differences, with some examples together.

• Umberto Eco – "Writings: IBM vs. Mac" This piece from 1994 was mentioned in a message I received today and seems more relevant than ever – although it may be that "Google" now plays the role of "DOS" and it may be that the churchmanship involved for them is an evangelical house-church… (tags: Mac DOS Religion History philosophy windows computing culture zeitgeist Google)
• Quality over time in Munich In which Floschi explains that the apparently slow implementation over in the City of Munich is becuase there's a full scale generational change going ion in their IT systems, and that any change of this magnitude would be just as slow even if it did not involve free/open source software. (tags: FOSS OpenSource Munich Government Procurement Strategy)
• 3hive: Bonobo This is some really good stuff from Bonobo. The frequency of posts on 3Hive seems to be way down but the quality (at least on my taste-o-meter) is way up. (tags: 3Hive Music)

Software. Hardware. Complete.  For the Oracle Enterprise Manager team, this is more than a mere slogan.  It's become a mantra and central focus.  In no part of the combined Oracle+Sun portfolio are the effects of this acquisition being felt faster than in the management stack.  A central focus for us is to ensure that customers have a single, integrated, powerful set of tools that manage the combination of Oracle's infrastructure and application software with Sun's OS and hardware.

To that end, today we're announcing Oracle Enterprise Manager Ops Center.  This tool is the newest member of the Enterprise Manager family and provides powerful management features for Systems Administrators and IT Operations.  Functions include:

• Hardware management (agentless monitoring, control of Lights Out Management units)
• Firmware provisioning and compliance checking
• Operating Systems bare-metal provisioning for Solaris and Linux
• World-class patching/updating functionality for Solaris, Linux and Windows
• Unmatched management of Solaris virtualization technologies such as Containers/Zones and Logical Domains
• And much more...

Of course, what we're introducing today goes beyond a mere re-skinning of Sun Ops Center.  The promise is to offer real integration, and now we're delivering on the first phase in that roadmap by introducing the Oracle Management Connector for Ops Center.  This software allows customers to connect an instance of Ops Center to an instance of Oracle Enterprise Manager Grid Control and connect the event streams of the two products, allowing for new levels of visibility into the customer's systems when using the combination of Oracle and Sun technology.

The screenshot below (click to enlarge) shows an example of what's possible.  It's shows a view from inside Grid Control.  Under the Alerts part of the view, you see two alert messages.  One is a warning about File Systems space that's generated by Grid Control.  However, what's new is the warning about the ambient temperature of the server exceeding a safe threshold (variable T_AMB which is pulled from the Sun ILOM processor by Ops Center).  This is all now combined into a single event stream that can give a DBA new insights into how the hardware on which their DB is hosted is performing. 

This is only the beginning.  Expect to see much more from us on deeper integration between Ops Center and Grid Control over the coming months.  Watch this space for more details.

For years and years I am using and promoting the term Open Standards. And it has always been very clear what an Open Standard is and, more important, what it is not.

You can go through various defintions of Open Standards:

• Free Software Foundation Europe
• European Interoperability Framework (v1)
• Digistan
• Danish Parliament
• Bruce Perens

And no matter what differences you find in those definitions, they all agree on some crucial points, the most important being the freedom to use and implement the standard without having to ask for permission or having to pay license fees for the use of an Open Standard.

The Freedom to Use and Implement is fundamental to Open Standards. This means that whatever so-called “Intellectual Property” like (software) patents etc might be involved in an Open Standard must be made available to any third party on a Royalty Free basis.

Which leads to a simple conclusion – if you have to pay for use/implementation of a standard, this standard is NOT an open standard.

If you agree this far, pay special attention to this:

Currently, the Chinese companies using technologies detained by European companies are not allowed to enter into negotiations on the amount of royalties due to the latter, when they use their essential patents in the framework of open standards. The situation is highly detrimental to European companies and their complaint has been reflected in the European Chamber of Commerce in China (EUCCC) – IPR Working Group’s Position Paper 2005. The Commission therefore urged the Chinese government to take action in order to ensure that those royalties are duly paid by Chinese companies.

Hartmut Pilch from FFII pointed my attention to this and added some valuable comments here.

Bottom line is – DG Trade, represented by Mr. Luc Pierre Devigne, seems to use the term Open Standards in a way that is simply not compatible with the accepted definition of Open Standards. Royalty payments on Open Standards can simply not exist in my view.

So either Mr. Devigne made a little mistake by using the term Open Standards here OR this is the start of redefining Open Standards to mean the exact opposite. Could someone talk to Mr. Devigne and ask hoim for clarification? This is an important question.

Mike Francois from Developpez.com recently translated into French an article I wrote on DZone. Here it is:

Interopérabilité d'OSGi avec la plateforme NetBeans

"Avec la sortie de NetBeans 6.9, la plate-forme de service OSGi s'est vue obtenir un support complet par l'EDI.

Geertjan Wielenga, auteur technique de l'équipe NetBeans, a rédigé un article sur l'interopérabilité d'OSGi avec la plate-forme NetBeans.

Ci-dessous, la traduction de son article qui je l'espère vous apprécierez autant que j'en ai eu pour le traduire."

So, it is great to have articles like this written, so that the NetBeans Platform can be introduced to French speakers too. At the same time, several French organizations are already making use of the NetBeans Platform, from the ray simulation analyzer at the University of Poitiers (described here) to the radar simulation analyzer at the French Ministry of Defence (described here).

And, in the next few weeks, a first NetBeans Platform Certified Training will be held for a selected group of new NetBeans Platform developers in France. That will be the first time that the course will be delivered via WebEx, maybe the start of several more, if everything turns out well. With Mike Francois from Developpez.com, I'm talking to see whether a small tour of cities/universities could be arranged to introduce the NetBeans Platform to French developers.

If French readers of the above are interested in this development in some way, feel free to say so (and suggest locations for trainings in France) privately via an e-mail to me or by leaving a comment at the end of this blog entry.

And yes, the legal news just continues to come. With high-profile lawsuits going on in the world of technology (Nokia vs. Apple, Apple vs. HTC), we really can't get around lots and lots of news about the subject. This latest tidbit we have for you is most interesting, and only serves to further confirm the rumours that Bing might become the default on the iPhone: Microsoft has more or less endorsed Apple's lawsuit against HTC.

Today's mobile space is owned by the likes of Nokia, RIM, Apple, and Google. While some of these corporations have embraced some open source components, a full FLOSS solution has yet to gain traction. Why? Blogger Bradley M. Kuhn posts thoughtful analysis of the current state of Open Source in the mobile space.

hi sys admins!

We changed the deadline for the call for papers. You have now one week extra to think about a talk you want to give during LOAD . We want to see your papers before march 23.

hope to see you there!

Last week, we looked at how essential scripting is for administering home servers (one of the 7 tips for home server bliss) and we wrote us a little script for enabling automatic snapshots.

Another thing that you'll almost certainly want to do on your OpenSolaris home server is enabling power management. This will ensure your server spends as little power as possible when idle, while still being powerful when needed. There's a whole community group devoted to power management and it's a good idea to check out their FAQ and check in on their discussions.

How To Configure Power Management in OpenSolaris

To enable power management on OpenSolaris, we need to do two things:

• Enable CPU power management: This will tell the system to switch the CPU into a lower power mode when idle.
• Enable disk power management: This tells the disks to switch to a lower power mode when there's no activity for a specified amount of time.

Both can be configured by editing the power.conf(4) file and then calling pmconfig(1M) to make the changes go live.

Let's write ourselves a script that does all of the configuration automatically, so we just need to call it and all of the system will be optimized for lower power consumption:

Manipulating the power.conf File

We'll assume full control of the relevant settings in power.conf. Whatever was written there before, after we're done with it, power management will be enabled. Likewise, if we decide to shut off power management, all settings that concern CPU and disk power management will be gone.

This makes our script more simple: We can create a function that rips off any CPU and disk PM settings, then either write back the result (to disable PM) or attach our own settings (to enable it).

(CPU PM is enabled by default on a fresh install of OpenSolaris 2009.06, but it's good to not make that assumption in case someone did change power.conf after all or when switching PM back on after having switched it explicitly off.)

Here's the piece of code that produces a "clean" version of power.conf, without any CPU or disk power management options:

function filter_power { # Purge power.conf from any custom settings cat $POWERCONF | \ grep -v cpupm | \ grep -v cpu-threshold | \ grep -v device-thresholds }

It makes sense to put it into its own function, as we'll use it for both setting up and tearing down power management.

The Proper Use Of Temporary Files

We'll use a temporary file to construct our new version of power.conf for two reasons:

• We can exchange the old version with a new one by using pfexec mv and don't need to run the whole script with full privileges (which would be needed to make any >power.conf bits work).
• We'll learn how to properly use temporary files in shell scripts.

In fact, Chris Gerhard recently wrote a blog post about how to properly set up temporary files so they clean up after themselves automatically. This is such a good practice that I want to emphasize it here by making it part of our power management script.

So here's the piece to clean up any CPU and disk power settings from power.conf and make the settings live:

# Create a temporary file name, make sure it's gone when we are. trap '${TMPFILE:+rm ${TMPFILE}}' EXIT US=$(basename $0) TMPFILE=$(/usr/bin/mktemp /tmp/${US}.XXXXXX)   function unconfigure_power { # Get a clean version of power.conf filter_power >$TMPFILE   # Copy back the temporary file into power.conf pfexec mv $TMPFILE /etc/power.conf && unset TMPFILE   # Activate the new power.conf file pfexec pmconfig } Taking Care Of Ownership And Permissions

But wait! Since we're exchanging the system's power.conf with one of our own, we need to make sure to set the file owners and permissions properly after the exchange. This is a job for another function:

# Adjust owner and permissions for power.conf function powerconf_perms { pfexec chown root:sys power.conf pfexec chmod 644 power.conf }

Of course we'll need to call this in the function above after the pfexec mv bit.

Detecting the Disks in the System

Now comes the tricky part: Each disk in the system needs its own entry with its device path in power.conf. But what's the best way to detect how many disks there are in the system and what their device paths are?

It turns out that format(1M) is our friend, because the first thing it does after starting it is to present us with a list of all disks, and their device paths.

Very well, but there's one caveat: format expects us to use it interactively, but we want to use it in a script. If we called format inside our script, it would wait for the user to navigate its menus by listening on STDIN, which we really don't want!

After some tweaking, I found out that you can send an empty input stream into format through echo, then it will automatically terminate itself after giving us its list of drives. The reason for this is most probably the EOF that STDIN will return to format after the (empty) input has been processed and thus, format will have no option but to terminate.

Here's the line that gives us all of the disks in the system:

disks=$( echo | $PFFORMAT | grep pci )

We use grep to filter out just the lines with the device paths.

Putting it All Together

Now that we have all the pieces, let's put together our power management configuration script. We'll abstract away all pfexec commands and the power.conf file itself into a block of constants at the beginning to make the code slightly cleaner:

#!/bin/ksh93 # # powersave # # Setup power saving parameters #   # Useful constants POWERCONF="/etc/power.conf" PFCHOWN="pfexec chown" PFCHMOD="pfexec chmod" PFMV="pfexec mv" PFPMCONFIG="pfexec pmconfig" PFFORMAT="pfexec format"   # Create a temporary file name, make sure it's gone when we are. trap '${TMPFILE:+rm ${TMPFILE}}' EXIT US=$(/usr/bin/basename $0) TMPFILE=$(mktemp /tmp/${US}.XXXXXX)   # Get parameters CMD=$1   # Adjust owner and permissions for power.conf function powerconf_perms { $PFCHOWN root:sys $POWERCONF $PFCHMOD 644 $POWERCONF }   function filter_power { # Purge power.conf from any custom settings cat $POWERCONF | \ grep -v cpupm | \ grep -v cpu-threshold | \ grep -v device-thresholds }   function unconfigure_power { # Get a clean version of power.conf filter_power >$TMPFILE   # Copy back the temporary file into power.conf $PFMV $TMPFILE $POWERCONF && unset TMPFILE   # Adjust permissions and owner powerconf_perms   # Activate the new power.conf file $PFPMCONFIG }   function configure_power { # Get a clean config to start with. filter_power >$TMPFILE   # Enable CPU power management echo "cpupm enable" >>$TMPFILE echo "cpu-threshold 1s" >>$TMPFILE   # Get a list of hard disk devices in the system by asking format disks=$( echo | $PFFORMAT | grep pci )   for i in $disks ; do echo "device-thresholds $i 5m" >>$TMPFILE done   # Copy the new power.conf back $PFMV $TMPFILE $POWERCONF && unset TMPFILE   # Adjust permissions and owner powerconf_perms   # Activate the new power.conf file $PFPMCONFIG }   # Show a help message. function show_help { echo "Usage: $0 command" echo "Supported commands are:" echo " on" echo " off" }   # # Main program. # # We support different subcommands. Switch to the corresponding subroutine, # then exit. # case $CMD in 'on' ) configure_power ;; 'off' ) unconfigure_power ;; 'help' | * ) show_help ;; esac   exit 0 Conclusion

I hear the following question quite often: "How can I set up power management on my server?". Now we have a script that does exactly that. We also learned a bit about the handling of temporary files and found a trick for getting a list of all of the disks that are available in the system.

You can tweak the script to your needs of course. Maybe you want to change the times after which CPU or disk PM kicks in. Or maybe you want to preserve the original power.conf file just in case before meddling with it. Or maybe you don't want to power manage all of the disks in your system but only some. Feel free to enhance the script and contribute your changes in the comments section of this post.

You can easily observe the effects of CPU power management with the powertop(1M) utility.

Observing the effects of disk power management is trickier: The setting is just forwarded to the disk and it's up to the drive to decide what to do after the idle time is up. Some disks will spin down, some merely spin slower and some won't do anything at all. Using a watt-meter and some patience may be the only way to find out what really happens.

Also, it may be difficult to achieve the idle state for your boot drives due to different system activities writing to log files etc. This is why separating data pools from the root pool is a good idea. Some even separate /var into a USB stick or other solid state media because of this.

Your Turn

What's your experience with OpenSolaris power management? Do you have ideas on how to improve this script? Have you measured the effects of disk power management on your server or did you find a way to programmatically verify that it works?
Share your views in the comments section below!

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• Seven Useful OpenSolaris ZFS Home Server Tips
• A Small and Energy Efficient OpenSolaris Home Server

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Update: Gregor suggested in the comments to use mktemp with it's path as the GNU and the Solaris version differ slightly. He also suggested to use basename to strip the script name when generating the temporary file. I just added the mods to the above code sample. Thanks!