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Tuesday, December 30, 2014

What is the (UNIX) load?

The "load" is use widely to describe stress/work applied onto a UNIX system. The simple rule is "lower than better". In the older days of uniprocessor machine load 1 was  kind of a borderline. In the new brave world of multi-core/processor machines load 1 means nothing.  Many people suggests that load equal or lower to number of processors/cores is good. That sound sensible, but not always is accurate.
Why? To answer that we have to comeback to question asked in the subject.

What is the "load"?

The load as the exponentially damped/weighted moving average of the number of processes, including threads, using or waiting for CPU and, at least at Linux, in uninterruptible sleep state in last 1, 5 and 15 minutes (see Wikipedia). The last part means that all processes/threads waiting for a disk (or other I/O device) will increase the load, without increasing a CPU usage. It leads to situation when the load lower than number of core/processes is danger. Let imagine few processes trying to dump important information on disks. Especially if all interrupts have affinity to one processor only (see this post) or just data are store in many small files. On the other hand, machine with very high load might be very responsive. Plenty of processes waiting to write information onto a disk not using a lot of memory and CPU in the same time. Just look at this picture:



If you want to know even more details of how the load is actually calculated
read this impressive white paper.


Links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Load_%28computing%29
http://www.teamquest.com/pdfs/whitepaper/ldavg1.pdf
http://larryn.blogspot.co.uk/2013/05/cpu-affinity-interrupts-and-old-kernel.html

Saturday, December 06, 2014

Install CyanogenMod at Nook HD+

Recently I decided to try the new Cyanomogen (CM11) on my Nook HD+. Initial reading indicated that I had to reinstall using Recovery rather than internal updater. I tried to login to Recovery so much, that I recovered official B&N OS which replaced CM.

I needed to start from beginning. I did some research and found that post. It looked good so I gave it a try. First download ClockworkMod attached to the post, but later I downloaded latest CM snapshot from  there and  added  Google Apps for CM11 from there. I put everything as described on SD Card and kicked off installation. It flew like an Albatross. (To be honest I don't know why I did write Albatross - maybe because of this?) 



Anyway CM11 works good at Nook HD+.

Links:

  • http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Ovation_Info
  • http://download.cyanogenmod.org/?type=snapshot&device=ovation
  • http://wiki.cyanogenmod.org/w/Google_Apps
  • http://forum.xda-developers.com/showpost.php?p=42406126&postcount=7
  • http://forum.xda-developers.com/attachment.php?attachmentid=2849350&d=1405272804