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  • Is there the equivalent of cloud computing for modems?

    - by morpheous
    I asked this question on SF, and someone recommended that I ask it here - (I don't think I have enough points to move a question from SF to SO - and in any case, I don't know how to do it - so here is the question again): I am interested in the concept of PAAS (platform as a service). However, all talk about SAAS/PAAS seems to focus on only the computer itself - not its peripherals. Is it possible to 'outsource' modems as a resource - so that an app running remotely can pump data to a modem in the cloud? As a bit of background to the question, a group of us are thinking of starting a company that offers similar services to companies like twilio etc - but I want to 'outsource' both the computing hardware (thats PAAS - the easy bit) and the modems (thats what I cant seem to find any info on). Does anyone know if modems can be bundled as part of a PAAS service? - alternatively, is there a way that an application running on one computer can communicate (i.e. pump data) to a remote modem residing on another machine?. I assume I can come up with some protocol over UDP or TCP - but there is no point reinventing the wheel - if such a protocol like that already exists (or if it some open source software allows one to do this). Any suggestions on how to solve this problem?

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  • When did my LaTeX files become TeX files!?

    - by andrz_001
    After transferring all my files onto a new machine, all files that were once LaTeX files (having the texnic center "T" icon) are now TeX files (having the TeX works icon --I don't remember installing that one!). But....the files are associated with the technic center! In other words, the files open with the texnic center, yet the "type of file" is "tex document". I'm using the same miktex distrubution and texnicCenter (both for windows xp) as on the old machine. Again, I don't know how/where I got this texworks on the new machine--assuming it came with windows. A question: Could these tex associations cause me any new surprises, anything unexpected? Like certain packages not working, etc? Because I can't have that!! Should I not fix it if it ain't broken!? For instance, one particular file yesterday would not produce any pdf output after compiling...after trying many things (other files compiled as they should have), I got to thinking to try it without the setspace for doublespacing!! And it worked. I have no idea why. Anyway.... Real question: How to revert to LaTeX file associations?? Rhetorical question: Would this question have better luck in ctan or stackoverflow? I guess I'll find out! Thank you wholeheartedly!

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  • Different approaches to share files over local network & playlists "collaboration"

    - by exTyn
    I know, that I can use Google to find methods to share files over local network [1]. But, I have never shared files over local network, and I want to do this in a good, professional way. Also, this could be a good community wiki, I think. Well, what I am asking for, is: what are pros and cons of different methods to sharing files ofver local network? In my case, I need to share files between Linux & Win 7, and I want it to be secure (= without access for anyone else but me & people in my room). Another question (connected with above topic) is about playing music over the local network. Let's say, I live with 2 other guys in a room, one of us have speakers and we want to collaborate in creating playlists (e.g. everyone is choosing 3 songs to be played). Is it possible? How to do this? I am asking this question on SuperUser, because it (question) is connected with hardware & software (network, connecting computers, software for managing playlists in network etc.). I think it is most accurate place for such question (I have considered SO and SF). [1] And I have already done this! But, I do not have an experience in this field (sharing files over local network), do I am asking about pros and cons.

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  • Sparing level on HP EVA 4000

    - by Samuel
    One of the disks of our EVA4000 died today. This diskgroup (all volumes vraid5 with sparing level 1 and almost no space left for more volumes, 1TiB drives) is being rebuilt with "spare space" right now, and it will take at least 15 hours to do the leveling/rebuilding. We can't get a new disk until Friday. So, the question is, what would happen if another disk dies before the leveling completes? Would we lose data? And after that, how many aditional disks could die before losing data? 1 or 2? In "usual" RAID, we would be vulnerable to data loss while the rebuild takes place, but in this case the space reserved for sparing is two times the size of the bigger disk, so at the very least the effect should be the same of having two spares. Thanks in advance. Update: I have found some interesting threads about this question but still can't answer to this question, so I'm starting a bounty. http://blog.thestoragearchitect.com/2008/10/27/understanding-eva/ http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=&esrc=s&source=web&cd=1&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.experts-exchange.com%2FStorage%2FStorage_Technology%2FQ_25548177.html (Expert Exchange question from google).

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  • Different approaches to share files over local network

    - by exTyn
    I know, that I can use Google to find methods to share files over local network [1]. But, I have never shared files over local network, and I want to do this in a good, professional way. Also, this could be a good community wiki, I think. Well, what I am asking for, is: what are pros and cons of different methods to sharing files ofver local network? In my case, I need to share files between Linux & Win 7, and I want it to be secure (= without access for anyone else but me & people in my room). Another question (connected with above topic) is about playing music over the local network. Let's say, I live with 2 other guys in a room, one of us have speakers and we want to collaborate in creating playlists (e.g. everyone is choosing 3 songs to be played). Is it possible? How to do this? I am asking this question on SuperUser, because it (question) is connected with hardware & software (network, connecting computers, software for managing playlists in network etc.). I think it is most accurate place for such question (I have considered SO and SF). [1] And I have already done this! But, I do not have an experience in this field (sharing files over local network), do I am asking about pros and cons.

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  • What is the peak theoretical WiFi G user density? [closed]

    - by Bigbio2002
    I've seen a few WiFi capacity planning questions, and this one is related, but hopefully different enough not to be closed. Also, this is related specifically to 802.11g, but a similar question could be made for N. In order to squeeze more WiFi users into a space, the transmit power on the APs need to be reduced and the APs squeezed closer together. My question is, how far can you practically take this before the network becomes unusable? There will come a point where the transmit power is so weak that nobody will actually be able to pick up a connection, or be constantly roaming to/from APs spaced a few feet apart as they walk around. There are also only 3 available channels to use as well, which is a factor to consider. After determining the peak AP density, then multiply by users-per-AP, which should be easier to find out. After factoring all of this in and running some back-of-the-envelope calculations, I'd like to be able to get a figure of "XX users per 10ft^2" or something. This can be considered the physical limit of WiFi, and will keep people from asking about getting 3,000 people in a ballroom conference on WiFi. Can anyone with WiFi experience chime in, or better yet, provide some calculations for a more accurate figure? Assumptions: Let's assume an ideal environment with no reflection (think of a big, square, open room, with the APs spaced out on a plane), APs are placed on the ceiling so humans won't absorb the waves, and the only interference are from the APs themselves and the devices. As for what devices specifically, that's irrelevant for the first point of the question (AP density, so only channel and transmit power should matter). User experience: Wikipedia states that Wireless G has about 22Mbps maximum effective throughput, or about 2.75MB/s. For the purpose of this question, anything below 100KB/s per user can be deemed to be a poor user experience. As for roaming, I'll assume the user is standing in the same place, so hopefully that will be a non-issue.

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  • DD-WRT Acces Point as a Router

    - by Dzh
    Following suggestion to this question asked on Network Engineering, I am asking the question here. this is an extension to my previous question (I think it was deleted), where I was claiming that DDWRT was disabling it's DHCP server once connected to the network. I was wrong, as it now seems that it is bridging itself with another parallel connected wireless router. I have two Draytek 2820 and one Netgear WG602v3 with latest DDWRT. Lets call one wired-Draytek and it has wireless disabled. The other one, let's call it wireless-Draytek, is connected to wired-Draytek and has wireless with MAC filtering enabled. Once I connect Netgear to the wired-Draytek, the client that connects to Netgear, will be assigned with IP address from the wireless-Draytek. If the MAC address is not on the wireles-Draytek, the client is unable to obtain IP address and has no connectivity at all, even with manually assigned static IP configuration. To illustrate further, this is how network is set up: wired-Draytek ---------- wireless-Draytek \_________ Netgear What I wish to have, is that Netgear issues IP addresses from it's own IP pool and ignores the MAC filtering rules from wireless-Draytek. This is kind of puzzling how this they are bridging (if they are) themselves automatically. Thanks. UPDATE: It's not a home network. I gave you a bit simplified set-up. If there is a better site on Stack Exchange to ask this, please let me know. The Drayteks are running stock firmware, it's only Netgear that I've flashed to get more stability. In addition to these routers, I have also three 3COM Baseline switch 2824, and another Draytek router with Prosafe FS752TP PoE switch dedicated for VoIP phones. Wired-Draytek has IP 10.0.0.1, DHCP disabled as there is AD DC which is issuing IP addresses. Wireless-Draytek has IP 1.1.1.1 and DHCP enabled. Netgear has default - 192.168.1.1. As per suggestion, the specific question is - how do I isolate these two wireless routers?

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  • VLAN ACLs and when to go Layer 3

    - by wuckachucka
    I want to: a) segment several departments into VLANs with the hopes of restricting access between them completely (Sales never needs to talk to Support's workstations or printers and vice-versa) or b) certain IP addresses and TCP/UDP ports across VLANS -- i.e. permitting the Sales VLAN to access the CRM Web Server in the Server VLAN on port 443 only. Port-wise, I'll need a 48-port switch and another 24-port switch to go with the two existing 24-port Layer 2 switches (Linksys); I'm looking at going with D-Links or HP Procurves as Cisco is out of our price range. Question #1: From what I understand (and please correct me if I'm wrong), if the Servers (VLAN10) and Sales (VLAN20) are all on the same 48-port switch (or two stacked 24-port switches), afaik, the switch "knows" what VLANs and ports each device belongs to and will switch packets between them; I can also apply ACLs to restrict access between VLANs at this point. Is this correct? Question #2: Now lets say that Support (VLAN30) is on a different switch (one of the Linksys) switches. I'm assuming I'll need to trunk (tag) switch #2's VLANs across to switch #1, so switch #1 sees switch #2's VLAN30 (and vice-versa). Once Switch #1 can "see" VLAN30, I'm assuming I can then apply ACLs as stated in Question #1. Is this correct? Question #3: Once Switch #1 can see all the VLANs, can I achieve the seemingly "Layer 3" ACL filtering of restricting access to Server VLAN on only certain TCP/UDP ports and IP addresses (say, only permitting 3389 to the Terminal Server, 192.168.10.4/32). I say "seemingly" because some of the Layer 2 switches mention the ability to restrict ports and IP addresses through the ACLs; I (perhaps mistakenly) thought that in order to have Layer 3 ACLs (packet filtering), I'd need to have at least one Layer 3 switch acting as a core router. If my assumptions are incorrect, at which point do you need a Layer 3 switch for inter-VLAN routing vs. inter-VLAN switching? Is it generally only when you need that higher-level packet filtering ability between your departments?

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  • background jobs and ssh connections

    - by petrelharp
    This question has come up quite a lot (really a lot), but I'm finding the answers to be generally incomplete. The general question is "Why does/doesn't my job get killed when I exit/kill ssh?", and here's what I've found. The first question is: How general is the following information? The following seems to be true for modern Debian linux, but I am missing some bits; and what do others need to know? All child processes, backgrounded or not of a shell opened over an ssh connection are killed with SIGHUP when the ssh connection is closed only if the huponexit option is set: run shopt huponexit to see if this is true. If huponexit is true, then you can use nohup or disown to dissociate the process from the shell so it does not get killed when you exit. If huponexit is false, which is the default on at least some linuxes these days, then backgrounded jobs will not be killed on normal logout. But even if huponexit is false, then if the ssh connection gets killed, or drops (different than normal logout), then backgrounded processes will still get killed. This can be avoided by disown or nohup as in (2). There is some distinction between (a) processes whose parent process is the terminal and (b) processes that have stdin, stdout, or stderr connected to the terminal. I don't know what happens to processes that are (a) and not (b), or vice versa. Final question: How can I avoid behavior (3)? In other words, by default in Debian backgrounded processes run along merrily by themselves after logout but not after the ssh connection is killed. I'd like the same thing to happen to processes regardless of whether the connection was closed normally or killed. Or, is this a bad idea?

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  • Connecting a Wifi router to receivers with a cable instead of antenna?

    - by 31eee384
    This is a very strange question--I'd go so far as to say it's a stupid question. I'm being told that it is possible to, to describe it briefly, use a cable to connect an access point and a receiver directly to one another. This means that I would unscrew the access point's antenna, and attach one end of a cable to the port. Then, on the wireless receiver, I would also unscrew the antenna and plug in the other side of the cable. I'm being told the connection would work after this, just as a normal Wifi connection would. Bonus mini-question: if this works, would it still work if a splitter were attached to the access point and multiple receivers plugged in to the network? What would happen if I do this? Based on my surprisingly deficient knowledge of radio transmission, I don't think it would work. I would like some help knowing why it won't (or will) though, if possible. This is a somewhat hypothetical question--I realize that Ethernet does this exact job very handily, and I could just throw in a switch instead of the splitter. I simply feel that I should understand this scenario. Thanks for any help you can offer.

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  • Localhost stop resolving/serving local site after a few clicks IIS 7.5

    - by Jo-Pierre
    previously I have searched tried to find the answer from a previous question, however Im not sure it was resolved. I could comment on the question to find more, so decided to post a new question. Previous question found (http://serverfault.com/questions/314333/localhost-stop-resolving-after-a-few-minutes-iis-7-5) So I set up a new website on Windows 7 IIS 7.5 ... I give it a host header and in the hosts file I add the entry for 127.0.0.1 and browse the site. After about the second or third time of trying to click around on the local site, it starts hanging ... just seems to be looking like its trying to load, but just eventually comes back in Firefox with "The connection was reset" (takes about 30-50 secs before this happens). I then used a program like CurrPorts, to view the ports that are listening, and for the initial request it all seems good. Now after the site is hanging, I dont see the hit coming through anymore. Its as if the browser loses touch with IIS or something. If I open a different browser, works fine for about 2 clicks or so, then same problem. Anyone know what could be causing this? Or how to resolve?

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  • How do I make a PPT file as small as possible?

    - by grunwald2.0
    Currently I am agonizing over several large presentation files, which I happened to reprint to PDFs... One thing I wondered: Do PPT's (from Microsoft Powerpoint) always to have to be that big? And what would be the strategies to make a PPT smaller? (If we say "ceterus paribus" at e.g. 25 slides and assuming that one isn't allowed to use a cloud-based service like GDocs, rocketslide or Prezio.) Of course there are the obvious "bad guys": Images and graphics. But: How about roll-over animations etc, who knows how much space they take? How about "smart arts"? Could one save file size if one would use "Open Office" or "Libre Office" Impress? (I didn't try it yet.) And "what if": What if we need to include e.g. five images (or charts that can't be remade in Excel in time), how would we best reduce the file size impact of those five images, if we needed to? I ask all this from an honest "business" perspective. I am no nerd or "Microsoft MVP" and I don't intend on delving into LATeX or similar yet. But that doesn't mean that I am not curious and very willing to learn. I am basically interested in (proven) best practices. Yes I know this question is lacking "initial research", but I think the perspective of my question is interesting and unique to a lot of people and if we intend to make SE a "Q&A" / Wiki kind-of reference site, this question might be a good way to "collect" advice on a question that has a very defined goal: Minimum file-size.

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  • maximum size filesystem on my test .... approach?

    - by jocco
    Hello all I'm new at the site, and I have a question. I got this question at a test and really like to know the correct approach to solving this problem? Here is the question. In an indexed filesystem the first indexblock (inode) has 12 direct pointers and 1 pointer to an indirect indexblock. The filesystem is implemented on a disk with a diskblock-size of 1024 bytes. All pointers are 32 bit. Question: what is the maximum filesize (Kilobytes) of this filesystem? If it's possible not an just an answer but an explanation. edit: It was a multiple choice btw with 4 answers a. 13 K b. 268 K c. 524 K d. 1036 K As for my approach I only got as far as to know that 1 pointer is 32 bit Also I found something else here on the site which seems very usefull. http://stackoverflow.com/questions/2755006/understanding-the-concept-of-inodes Ok i got this far There are 12 blocks and each block is 1024 bytes. 1024 * 12 = 12288 bytes or 12 KB directly accessible. Please correct me if I'm wrong. Each pointer is 32 Bit = 4Byte And to be honest at this point I'm starting to get confused especially since my answer is way over any of my multiple choice answers.

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  • screen scraper templates for various websites

    - by intuited
    I'm looking specifically for a convenient way to locally archive posts from this and other similar sites. I'd like to separate the question itself from the answers, or maybe crop the question and store it, keeping the page title. Obviously I don't need to store the menu or the various other site interface chrome. The best way to do this would seem to be to associate an XSLT template with a match on the URL and use that template to pull the various relevant informations and format them. My two-part question: Is there a tool specifically built for this task? I.E. something that takes a URL and checks it against a map of path-matching expressions to templates, and outputs the result of applying the template to that resource? xmlto seems to be most of the way there, and could probably just be called from a script that does the pattern-matching, but something already integrated would be more convenient. Is such a URL_pattern-to-XSLT_template map publicly available somewhere? Question 2.5: Is it legal to do this with sites like this one that have public licenses on their content?

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  • Database model for keeping track of likes/shares/comments on blog posts over time

    - by gage
    My goal is to keep track of the popular posts on different blog sites based on social network activity at any given time. The goal is not to simply get the most popular now, but instead find posts that are popular compared to other posts on the same blog. For example, I follow a tech blog, a sports blog, and a gossip blog. The tech blog gets waaay more readership than the other two blogs, so in raw numbers every post on the tech blog will always out number views on the other two. So lets say the average tech blog post gets 500 facebook likes and the other two get an average of 50 likes per post. Then when there is a sports blog post that has 200 fb likes and a gossip blog post with 300 while the tech blog posts today have 500 likes I want to highlight the sports and gossip blog posts (more likes than average vs tech blog with more # of likes but just average for the blog) The approach I am thinking of taking is to make an entry in a database for each blog post. Every x minutes (say every 15 minutes) I will check how many likes/shares/comments an entry has received on all the social networks (facebook, twitter, google+, linkeIn). So over time there will be a history of likes for each blog post, i.e post 1234 after 15 min: 10 fb likes, 4 tweets, 6 g+ after 30 min: 15 fb likes, 15 tweets, 10 g+ ... ... after 48 hours: 200 fb likes, 25 tweets, 15 g+ By keeping a history like this for each blog post I can know the average number of likes/shares/tweets at any give time interval. So for example the average number of fb likes for all blog posts 48hrs after posting is 50, and a particular post has 200 I can mark that as a popular post and feature/highlight it. A consideration in the design is to be able to easily query the values (likes/shares) for a specific time-frame, i.e. fb likes after 30min or tweets after 24 hrs in-order to compute averages with which to compare against (or should averages be stored in it's own table?) If this approach is flawed or could use improvement please let me know, but it is not my main question. My main question is what should a database scheme for storing this info look like? Assuming that the above approach is taken I am trying to figure out what a database schema for storing the likes over time would look like. I am brand new to databases, in doing some basic reading I see that it is advisable to make a 3NF database. I have come up with the following possible schema. Schema 1 DB Popular Posts Table: Post post_id ( primary key(pk) ) url title Table: Social Activity activity_id (pk) url (fk) type (i.e. facebook,twitter,g+) value timestamp This was my initial instinct (base on my very limited db knowledge). As far as I under stand this schema would be 3NF? I searched for designs of similar database model, and found this question on stackoverflow, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/11216080/data-structure-for-storing-height-and-weight-etc-over-time-for-multiple-users . The scenario in that question is similar (recording weight/height of users overtime). Taking the accepted answer for that question and applying it to my model results in something like: Schema 2 (same as above, but break down the social activity into 2 tables) DB Popular Posts Table: Post post_id (pk) url title Table: Social Measurement measurement_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp Table: Social stat stat_id (pk) measurement_id (fk) type (i.e. facebook,twitter,g+) value The advantage I see in schema 2 is that I will likely want to access all the values for a given time, i.e. when making a measurement at 30min after a post is published I will simultaneous check number of fb likes, fb shares, fb comments, tweets, g+, linkedIn. So with this schema it may be easier get get all stats for a measurement_id corresponding to a certain time, i.e. all social stats for post 1234 at time x. Another thought I had is since it doesn't make sense to compare number of fb likes with number of tweets or g+ shares, maybe it makes sense to separate each social measurement into it's own table? Schema 3 DB Popular Posts Table: Post post_id (pk) url title Table: fb_likes fb_like_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value Table: fb_shares fb_shares_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value Table: tweets tweets__id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value Table: google_plus google_plus_id (pk) post_id (fk) timestamp value As you can see I am generally lost/unsure of what approach to take. I'm sure this typical type of database problem (storing measurements overtime, i.e temperature statistic) that must have a common solution. Is there a design pattern/model for this, does it have a name? I tried searching for "database periodic data collection" or "database measurements over time" but didn't find anything specific. What would be an appropriate model to solve the needs of this problem?

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  • Using BPEL Performance Statistics to Diagnose Performance Bottlenecks

    - by fip
    Tuning performance of Oracle SOA 11G applications could be challenging. Because SOA is a platform for you to build composite applications that connect many applications and "services", when the overall performance is slow, the bottlenecks could be anywhere in the system: the applications/services that SOA connects to, the infrastructure database, or the SOA server itself.How to quickly identify the bottleneck becomes crucial in tuning the overall performance. Fortunately, the BPEL engine in Oracle SOA 11G (and 10G, for that matter) collects BPEL Engine Performance Statistics, which show the latencies of low level BPEL engine activities. The BPEL engine performance statistics can make it a bit easier for you to identify the performance bottleneck. Although the BPEL engine performance statistics are always available, the access to and interpretation of them are somewhat obscure in the early and current (PS5) 11G versions. This blog attempts to offer instructions that help you to enable, retrieve and interpret the performance statistics, before the future versions provides a more pleasant user experience. Overview of BPEL Engine Performance Statistics  SOA BPEL has a feature of collecting some performance statistics and store them in memory. One MBean attribute, StatLastN, configures the size of the memory buffer to store the statistics. This memory buffer is a "moving window", in a way that old statistics will be flushed out by the new if the amount of data exceeds the buffer size. Since the buffer size is limited by StatLastN, impacts of statistics collection on performance is minimal. By default StatLastN=-1, which means no collection of performance data. Once the statistics are collected in the memory buffer, they can be retrieved via another MBean oracle.as.soainfra.bpel:Location=[Server Name],name=BPELEngine,type=BPELEngine.> My friend in Oracle SOA development wrote this simple 'bpelstat' web app that looks up and retrieves the performance data from the MBean and displays it in a human readable form. It does not have beautiful UI but it is fairly useful. Although in Oracle SOA 11.1.1.5 onwards the same statistics can be viewed via a more elegant UI under "request break down" at EM -> SOA Infrastructure -> Service Engines -> BPEL -> Statistics, some unsophisticated minds like mine may still prefer the simplicity of the 'bpelstat' JSP. One thing that simple JSP does do well is that you can save the page and send it to someone to further analyze Follows are the instructions of how to install and invoke the BPEL statistic JSP. My friend in SOA Development will soon blog about interpreting the statistics. Stay tuned. Step1: Enable BPEL Engine Statistics for Each SOA Servers via Enterprise Manager First st you need to set the StatLastN to some number as a way to enable the collection of BPEL Engine Performance Statistics EM Console -> soa-infra(Server Name) -> SOA Infrastructure -> SOA Administration -> BPEL Properties Click on "More BPEL Configuration Properties" Click on attribute "StatLastN", set its value to some integer number. Typically you want to set it 1000 or more. Step 2: Download and Deploy bpelstat.war File to Admin Server, Note: the WAR file contains a JSP that does NOT have any security restriction. You do NOT want to keep in your production server for a long time as it is a security hazard. Deactivate the war once you are done. Download the bpelstat.war to your local PC At WebLogic Console, Go to Deployments -> Install Click on the "upload your file(s)" Click the "Browse" button to upload the deployment to Admin Server Accept the uploaded file as the path, click next Check the default option "Install this deployment as an application" Check "AdminServer" as the target server Finish the rest of the deployment with default settings Console -> Deployments Check the box next to "bpelstat" application Click on the "Start" button. It will change the state of the app from "prepared" to "active" Step 3: Invoke the BPEL Statistic Tool The BPELStat tool merely call the MBean of BPEL server and collects and display the in-memory performance statics. You usually want to do that after some peak loads. Go to http://<admin-server-host>:<admin-server-port>/bpelstat Enter the correct admin hostname, port, username and password Enter the SOA Server Name from which you want to collect the performance statistics. For example, SOA_MS1, etc. Click Submit Keep doing the same for all SOA servers. Step 3: Interpret the BPEL Engine Statistics You will see a few categories of BPEL Statistics from the JSP Page. First it starts with the overall latency of BPEL processes, grouped by synchronous and asynchronous processes. Then it provides the further break down of the measurements through the life time of a BPEL request, which is called the "request break down". 1. Overall latency of BPEL processes The top of the page shows that the elapse time of executing the synchronous process TestSyncBPELProcess from the composite TestComposite averages at about 1543.21ms, while the elapse time of executing the asynchronous process TestAsyncBPELProcess from the composite TestComposite2 averages at about 1765.43ms. The maximum and minimum latency were also shown. Synchronous process statistics <statistics>     <stats key="default/TestComposite!2.0.2-ScopedJMSOSB*soa_bfba2527-a9ba-41a7-95c5-87e49c32f4ff/TestSyncBPELProcess" min="1234" max="4567" average="1543.21" count="1000">     </stats> </statistics> Asynchronous process statistics <statistics>     <stats key="default/TestComposite2!2.0.2-ScopedJMSOSB*soa_bfba2527-a9ba-41a7-95c5-87e49c32f4ff/TestAsyncBPELProcess" min="2234" max="3234" average="1765.43" count="1000">     </stats> </statistics> 2. Request break down Under the overall latency categorized by synchronous and asynchronous processes is the "Request breakdown". Organized by statistic keys, the Request breakdown gives finer grain performance statistics through the life time of the BPEL requests.It uses indention to show the hierarchy of the statistics. Request breakdown <statistics>     <stats key="eng-composite-request" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="0">         <stats key="eng-single-request" min="22" max="606" average="258.43" count="277">             <stats key="populate-context" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="248"> Please note that in SOA 11.1.1.6, the statistics under Request breakdown is aggregated together cross all the BPEL processes based on statistic keys. It does not differentiate between BPEL processes. If two BPEL processes happen to have the statistic that share same statistic key, the statistics from two BPEL processes will be aggregated together. Keep this in mind when we go through more details below. 2.1 BPEL process activity latencies A very useful measurement in the Request Breakdown is the performance statistics of the BPEL activities you put in your BPEL processes: Assign, Invoke, Receive, etc. The names of the measurement in the JSP page directly come from the names to assign to each BPEL activity. These measurements are under the statistic key "actual-perform" Example 1:  Follows is the measurement for BPEL activity "AssignInvokeCreditProvider_Input", which looks like the Assign activity in a BPEL process that assign an input variable before passing it to the invocation:                                <stats key="AssignInvokeCreditProvider_Input" min="1" max="8" average="1.9" count="153">                                     <stats key="sensor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="1" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="sensor-send-variable-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="monitor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                 </stats> Note: because as previously mentioned that the statistics cross all BPEL processes are aggregated together based on statistic keys, if two BPEL processes happen to name their Invoke activity the same name, they will show up at one measurement (i.e. statistic key). Example 2: Follows is the measurement of BPEL activity called "InvokeCreditProvider". You can not only see that by average it takes 3.31ms to finish this call (pretty fast) but also you can see from the further break down that most of this 3.31 ms was spent on the "invoke-service".                                  <stats key="InvokeCreditProvider" min="1" max="13" average="3.31" count="153">                                     <stats key="initiate-correlation-set-again" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="invoke-service" min="1" max="13" average="3.08" count="153">                                         <stats key="prep-call" min="0" max="1" average="0.04" count="153">                                         </stats>                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="initiate-correlation-set" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="sensor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="sensor-send-variable-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="153">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="monitor-send-activity-data" min="0" max="0" average="0.0" count="306">                                     </stats>                                     <stats key="update-audit-trail" min="0" max="2" average="0.03" count="153">                                     </stats>                                 </stats> 2.2 BPEL engine activity latency Another type of measurements under Request breakdown are the latencies of underlying system level engine activities. These activities are not directly tied to a particular BPEL process or process activity, but they are critical factors in the overall engine performance. These activities include the latency of saving asynchronous requests to database, and latency of process dehydration. My friend Malkit Bhasin is working on providing more information on interpreting the statistics on engine activities on his blog (https://blogs.oracle.com/malkit/). I will update this blog once the information becomes available. Update on 2012-10-02: My friend Malkit Bhasin has published the detail interpretation of the BPEL service engine statistics at his blog http://malkit.blogspot.com/2012/09/oracle-bpel-engine-soa-suite.html.

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  • Toorcon 15 (2013)

    - by danx
    The Toorcon gang (senior staff): h1kari (founder), nfiltr8, and Geo Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Making Attacks Go Backwards Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Introduction to Toorcon 15 (2013) Toorcon 15 is the 15th annual security conference held in San Diego. I've attended about a third of them and blogged about previous conferences I attended here starting in 2003. As always, I've only summarized the talks I attended and interested me enough to write about them. Be aware that I may have misrepresented the speaker's remarks and that they are not my remarks or opinion, or those of my employer, so don't quote me or them. Those seeking further details may contact the speakers directly or use The Google. For some talks, I have a URL for further information. A Tale of One Software Bypass of MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Andrew Furtak and Oleksandr Bazhaniuk Yuri Bulygin, Oleksandr ("Alex") Bazhaniuk, and (not present) Andrew Furtak Yuri and Alex talked about UEFI and Bootkits and bypassing MS Windows 8 Secure Boot, with vendor recommendations. They previously gave this talk at the BlackHat 2013 conference. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Overview UEFI (Unified Extensible Firmware Interface) is interface between hardware and OS. UEFI is processor and architecture independent. Malware can replace bootloader (bootx64.efi, bootmgfw.efi). Once replaced can modify kernel. Trivial to replace bootloader. Today many legacy bootkits—UEFI replaces them most of them. MS Windows 8 Secure Boot verifies everything you load, either through signatures or hashes. UEFI firmware relies on secure update (with signed update). You would think Secure Boot would rely on ROM (such as used for phones0, but you can't do that for PCs—PCs use writable memory with signatures DXE core verifies the UEFI boat loader(s) OS Loader (winload.efi, winresume.efi) verifies the OS kernel A chain of trust is established with a root key (Platform Key, PK), which is a cert belonging to the platform vendor. Key Exchange Keys (KEKs) verify an "authorized" database (db), and "forbidden" database (dbx). X.509 certs with SHA-1/SHA-256 hashes. Keys are stored in non-volatile (NV) flash-based NVRAM. Boot Services (BS) allow adding/deleting keys (can't be accessed once OS starts—which uses Run-Time (RT)). Root cert uses RSA-2048 public keys and PKCS#7 format signatures. SecureBoot — enable disable image signature checks SetupMode — update keys, self-signed keys, and secure boot variables CustomMode — allows updating keys Secure Boot policy settings are: always execute, never execute, allow execute on security violation, defer execute on security violation, deny execute on security violation, query user on security violation Attacking MS Windows 8 Secure Boot Secure Boot does NOT protect from physical access. Can disable from console. Each BIOS vendor implements Secure Boot differently. There are several platform and BIOS vendors. It becomes a "zoo" of implementations—which can be taken advantage of. Secure Boot is secure only when all vendors implement it correctly. Allow only UEFI firmware signed updates protect UEFI firmware from direct modification in flash memory protect FW update components program SPI controller securely protect secure boot policy settings in nvram protect runtime api disable compatibility support module which allows unsigned legacy Can corrupt the Platform Key (PK) EFI root certificate variable in SPI flash. If PK is not found, FW enters setup mode wich secure boot turned off. Can also exploit TPM in a similar manner. One is not supposed to be able to directly modify the PK in SPI flash from the OS though. But they found a bug that they can exploit from User Mode (undisclosed) and demoed the exploit. It loaded and ran their own bootkit. The exploit requires a reboot. Multiple vendors are vulnerable. They will disclose this exploit to vendors in the future. Recommendations: allow only signed updates protect UEFI fw in ROM protect EFI variable store in ROM Breaching SSL, One Byte at a Time Yoel Gluck and Angelo Prado Angelo Prado and Yoel Gluck, Salesforce.com CRIME is software that performs a "compression oracle attack." This is possible because the SSL protocol doesn't hide length, and because SSL compresses the header. CRIME requests with every possible character and measures the ciphertext length. Look for the plaintext which compresses the most and looks for the cookie one byte-at-a-time. SSL Compression uses LZ77 to reduce redundancy. Huffman coding replaces common byte sequences with shorter codes. US CERT thinks the SSL compression problem is fixed, but it isn't. They convinced CERT that it wasn't fixed and they issued a CVE. BREACH, breachattrack.com BREACH exploits the SSL response body (Accept-Encoding response, Content-Encoding). It takes advantage of the fact that the response is not compressed. BREACH uses gzip and needs fairly "stable" pages that are static for ~30 seconds. It needs attacker-supplied content (say from a web form or added to a URL parameter). BREACH listens to a session's requests and responses, then inserts extra requests and responses. Eventually, BREACH guesses a session's secret key. Can use compression to guess contents one byte at-a-time. For example, "Supersecret SupersecreX" (a wrong guess) compresses 10 bytes, and "Supersecret Supersecret" (a correct guess) compresses 11 bytes, so it can find each character by guessing every character. To start the guess, BREACH needs at least three known initial characters in the response sequence. Compression length then "leaks" information. Some roadblocks include no winners (all guesses wrong) or too many winners (multiple possibilities that compress the same). The solutions include: lookahead (guess 2 or 3 characters at-a-time instead of 1 character). Expensive rollback to last known conflict check compression ratio can brute-force first 3 "bootstrap" characters, if needed (expensive) block ciphers hide exact plain text length. Solution is to align response in advance to block size Mitigations length: use variable padding secrets: dynamic CSRF tokens per request secret: change over time separate secret to input-less servlets Future work eiter understand DEFLATE/GZIP HTTPS extensions Running at 99%: Surviving an Application DoS Ryan Huber Ryan Huber, Risk I/O Ryan first discussed various ways to do a denial of service (DoS) attack against web services. One usual method is to find a slow web page and do several wgets. Or download large files. Apache is not well suited at handling a large number of connections, but one can put something in front of it Can use Apache alternatives, such as nginx How to identify malicious hosts short, sudden web requests user-agent is obvious (curl, python) same url requested repeatedly no web page referer (not normal) hidden links. hide a link and see if a bot gets it restricted access if not your geo IP (unless the website is global) missing common headers in request regular timing first seen IP at beginning of attack count requests per hosts (usually a very large number) Use of captcha can mitigate attacks, but you'll lose a lot of genuine users. Bouncer, goo.gl/c2vyEc and www.github.com/rawdigits/Bouncer Bouncer is software written by Ryan in netflow. Bouncer has a small, unobtrusive footprint and detects DoS attempts. It closes blacklisted sockets immediately (not nice about it, no proper close connection). Aggregator collects requests and controls your web proxies. Need NTP on the front end web servers for clean data for use by bouncer. Bouncer is also useful for a popularity storm ("Slashdotting") and scraper storms. Future features: gzip collection data, documentation, consumer library, multitask, logging destroyed connections. Takeaways: DoS mitigation is easier with a complete picture Bouncer designed to make it easier to detect and defend DoS—not a complete cure Security Response in the Age of Mass Customized Attacks Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman Peleus Uhley and Karthik Raman, Adobe ASSET, blogs.adobe.com/asset/ Peleus and Karthik talked about response to mass-customized exploits. Attackers behave much like a business. "Mass customization" refers to concept discussed in the book Future Perfect by Stan Davis of Harvard Business School. Mass customization is differentiating a product for an individual customer, but at a mass production price. For example, the same individual with a debit card receives basically the same customized ATM experience around the world. Or designing your own PC from commodity parts. Exploit kits are another example of mass customization. The kits support multiple browsers and plugins, allows new modules. Exploit kits are cheap and customizable. Organized gangs use exploit kits. A group at Berkeley looked at 77,000 malicious websites (Grier et al., "Manufacturing Compromise: The Emergence of Exploit-as-a-Service", 2012). They found 10,000 distinct binaries among them, but derived from only a dozen or so exploit kits. Characteristics of Mass Malware: potent, resilient, relatively low cost Technical characteristics: multiple OS, multipe payloads, multiple scenarios, multiple languages, obfuscation Response time for 0-day exploits has gone down from ~40 days 5 years ago to about ~10 days now. So the drive with malware is towards mass customized exploits, to avoid detection There's plenty of evicence that exploit development has Project Manager bureaucracy. They infer from the malware edicts to: support all versions of reader support all versions of windows support all versions of flash support all browsers write large complex, difficult to main code (8750 lines of JavaScript for example Exploits have "loose coupling" of multipe versions of software (adobe), OS, and browser. This allows specific attacks against specific versions of multiple pieces of software. Also allows exploits of more obscure software/OS/browsers and obscure versions. Gave examples of exploits that exploited 2, 3, 6, or 14 separate bugs. However, these complete exploits are more likely to be buggy or fragile in themselves and easier to defeat. Future research includes normalizing malware and Javascript. Conclusion: The coming trend is that mass-malware with mass zero-day attacks will result in mass customization of attacks. x86 Rewriting: Defeating RoP and other Shinanighans Richard Wartell Richard Wartell The attack vector we are addressing here is: First some malware causes a buffer overflow. The malware has no program access, but input access and buffer overflow code onto stack Later the stack became non-executable. The workaround malware used was to write a bogus return address to the stack jumping to malware Later came ASLR (Address Space Layout Randomization) to randomize memory layout and make addresses non-deterministic. The workaround malware used was to jump t existing code segments in the program that can be used in bad ways "RoP" is Return-oriented Programming attacks. RoP attacks use your own code and write return address on stack to (existing) expoitable code found in program ("gadgets"). Pinkie Pie was paid $60K last year for a RoP attack. One solution is using anti-RoP compilers that compile source code with NO return instructions. ASLR does not randomize address space, just "gadgets". IPR/ILR ("Instruction Location Randomization") randomizes each instruction with a virtual machine. Richard's goal was to randomize a binary with no source code access. He created "STIR" (Self-Transofrming Instruction Relocation). STIR disassembles binary and operates on "basic blocks" of code. The STIR disassembler is conservative in what to disassemble. Each basic block is moved to a random location in memory. Next, STIR writes new code sections with copies of "basic blocks" of code in randomized locations. The old code is copied and rewritten with jumps to new code. the original code sections in the file is marked non-executible. STIR has better entropy than ASLR in location of code. Makes brute force attacks much harder. STIR runs on MS Windows (PEM) and Linux (ELF). It eliminated 99.96% or more "gadgets" (i.e., moved the address). Overhead usually 5-10% on MS Windows, about 1.5-4% on Linux (but some code actually runs faster!). The unique thing about STIR is it requires no source access and the modified binary fully works! Current work is to rewrite code to enforce security policies. For example, don't create a *.{exe,msi,bat} file. Or don't connect to the network after reading from the disk. Clowntown Express: interesting bugs and running a bug bounty program Collin Greene Collin Greene, Facebook Collin talked about Facebook's bug bounty program. Background at FB: FB has good security frameworks, such as security teams, external audits, and cc'ing on diffs. But there's lots of "deep, dark, forgotten" parts of legacy FB code. Collin gave several examples of bountied bugs. Some bounty submissions were on software purchased from a third-party (but bounty claimers don't know and don't care). We use security questions, as does everyone else, but they are basically insecure (often easily discoverable). Collin didn't expect many bugs from the bounty program, but they ended getting 20+ good bugs in first 24 hours and good submissions continue to come in. Bug bounties bring people in with different perspectives, and are paid only for success. Bug bounty is a better use of a fixed amount of time and money versus just code review or static code analysis. The Bounty program started July 2011 and paid out $1.5 million to date. 14% of the submissions have been high priority problems that needed to be fixed immediately. The best bugs come from a small % of submitters (as with everything else)—the top paid submitters are paid 6 figures a year. Spammers like to backstab competitors. The youngest sumitter was 13. Some submitters have been hired. Bug bounties also allows to see bugs that were missed by tools or reviews, allowing improvement in the process. Bug bounties might not work for traditional software companies where the product has release cycle or is not on Internet. Active Fingerprinting of Encrypted VPNs Anna Shubina Anna Shubina, Dartmouth Institute for Security, Technology, and Society (I missed the start of her talk because another track went overtime. But I have the DVD of the talk, so I'll expand later) IPsec leaves fingerprints. Using netcat, one can easily visually distinguish various crypto chaining modes just from packet timing on a chart (example, DES-CBC versus AES-CBC) One can tell a lot about VPNs just from ping roundtrips (such as what router is used) Delayed packets are not informative about a network, especially if far away from the network More needed to explore about how TCP works in real life with respect to timing Making Attacks Go Backwards Fuzzynop FuzzyNop, Mandiant This talk is not about threat attribution (finding who), product solutions, politics, or sales pitches. But who are making these malware threats? It's not a single person or group—they have diverse skill levels. There's a lot of fat-fingered fumblers out there. Always look for low-hanging fruit first: "hiding" malware in the temp, recycle, or root directories creation of unnamed scheduled tasks obvious names of files and syscalls ("ClearEventLog") uncleared event logs. Clearing event log in itself, and time of clearing, is a red flag and good first clue to look for on a suspect system Reverse engineering is hard. Disassembler use takes practice and skill. A popular tool is IDA Pro, but it takes multiple interactive iterations to get a clean disassembly. Key loggers are used a lot in targeted attacks. They are typically custom code or built in a backdoor. A big tip-off is that non-printable characters need to be printed out (such as "[Ctrl]" "[RightShift]") or time stamp printf strings. Look for these in files. Presence is not proof they are used. Absence is not proof they are not used. Java exploits. Can parse jar file with idxparser.py and decomile Java file. Java typially used to target tech companies. Backdoors are the main persistence mechanism (provided externally) for malware. Also malware typically needs command and control. Application of Artificial Intelligence in Ad-Hoc Static Code Analysis John Ashaman John Ashaman, Security Innovation Initially John tried to analyze open source files with open source static analysis tools, but these showed thousands of false positives. Also tried using grep, but tis fails to find anything even mildly complex. So next John decided to write his own tool. His approach was to first generate a call graph then analyze the graph. However, the problem is that making a call graph is really hard. For example, one problem is "evil" coding techniques, such as passing function pointer. First the tool generated an Abstract Syntax Tree (AST) with the nodes created from method declarations and edges created from method use. Then the tool generated a control flow graph with the goal to find a path through the AST (a maze) from source to sink. The algorithm is to look at adjacent nodes to see if any are "scary" (a vulnerability), using heuristics for search order. The tool, called "Scat" (Static Code Analysis Tool), currently looks for C# vulnerabilities and some simple PHP. Later, he plans to add more PHP, then JSP and Java. For more information see his posts in Security Innovation blog and NRefactory on GitHub. Mask Your Checksums—The Gorry Details Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Eric (XlogicX) Davisson Sometimes in emailing or posting TCP/IP packets to analyze problems, you may want to mask the IP address. But to do this correctly, you need to mask the checksum too, or you'll leak information about the IP. Problem reports found in stackoverflow.com, sans.org, and pastebin.org are usually not masked, but a few companies do care. If only the IP is masked, the IP may be guessed from checksum (that is, it leaks data). Other parts of packet may leak more data about the IP. TCP and IP checksums both refer to the same data, so can get more bits of information out of using both checksums than just using one checksum. Also, one can usually determine the OS from the TTL field and ports in a packet header. If we get hundreds of possible results (16x each masked nibble that is unknown), one can do other things to narrow the results, such as look at packet contents for domain or geo information. With hundreds of results, can import as CSV format into a spreadsheet. Can corelate with geo data and see where each possibility is located. Eric then demoed a real email report with a masked IP packet attached. Was able to find the exact IP address, given the geo and university of the sender. Point is if you're going to mask a packet, do it right. Eric wouldn't usually bother, but do it correctly if at all, to not create a false impression of security. Adventures with weird machines thirty years after "Reflections on Trusting Trust" Sergey Bratus Sergey Bratus, Dartmouth College (and Julian Bangert and Rebecca Shapiro, not present) "Reflections on Trusting Trust" refers to Ken Thompson's classic 1984 paper. "You can't trust code that you did not totally create yourself." There's invisible links in the chain-of-trust, such as "well-installed microcode bugs" or in the compiler, and other planted bugs. Thompson showed how a compiler can introduce and propagate bugs in unmodified source. But suppose if there's no bugs and you trust the author, can you trust the code? Hell No! There's too many factors—it's Babylonian in nature. Why not? Well, Input is not well-defined/recognized (code's assumptions about "checked" input will be violated (bug/vunerabiliy). For example, HTML is recursive, but Regex checking is not recursive. Input well-formed but so complex there's no telling what it does For example, ELF file parsing is complex and has multiple ways of parsing. Input is seen differently by different pieces of program or toolchain Any Input is a program input executes on input handlers (drives state changes & transitions) only a well-defined execution model can be trusted (regex/DFA, PDA, CFG) Input handler either is a "recognizer" for the inputs as a well-defined language (see langsec.org) or it's a "virtual machine" for inputs to drive into pwn-age ELF ABI (UNIX/Linux executible file format) case study. Problems can arise from these steps (without planting bugs): compiler linker loader ld.so/rtld relocator DWARF (debugger info) exceptions The problem is you can't really automatically analyze code (it's the "halting problem" and undecidable). Only solution is to freeze code and sign it. But you can't freeze everything! Can't freeze ASLR or loading—must have tables and metadata. Any sufficiently complex input data is the same as VM byte code Example, ELF relocation entries + dynamic symbols == a Turing Complete Machine (TM). @bxsays created a Turing machine in Linux from relocation data (not code) in an ELF file. For more information, see Rebecca "bx" Shapiro's presentation from last year's Toorcon, "Programming Weird Machines with ELF Metadata" @bxsays did same thing with Mach-O bytecode Or a DWARF exception handling data .eh_frame + glibc == Turning Machine X86 MMU (IDT, GDT, TSS): used address translation to create a Turning Machine. Page handler reads and writes (on page fault) memory. Uses a page table, which can be used as Turning Machine byte code. Example on Github using this TM that will fly a glider across the screen Next Sergey talked about "Parser Differentials". That having one input format, but two parsers, will create confusion and opportunity for exploitation. For example, CSRs are parsed during creation by cert requestor and again by another parser at the CA. Another example is ELF—several parsers in OS tool chain, which are all different. Can have two different Program Headers (PHDRs) because ld.so parses multiple PHDRs. The second PHDR can completely transform the executable. This is described in paper in the first issue of International Journal of PoC. Conclusions trusting computers not only about bugs! Bugs are part of a problem, but no by far all of it complex data formats means bugs no "chain of trust" in Babylon! (that is, with parser differentials) we need to squeeze complexity out of data until data stops being "code equivalent" Further information See and langsec.org. USENIX WOOT 2013 (Workshop on Offensive Technologies) for "weird machines" papers and videos.

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  • No sound after video card replaced (AMD Radeon HD 7770)

    - by Sean
    Issue: no sound System: Dual boot Windows 7 (sda) Ubuntu 12.04 (sdb) 2 harddrives Dell XPS 730 Video card: AMD Radeo HD 7770 Diamond Multimedia Sound card: Creative Labs SB X-Fi Additional info: My sound used to work. Then, my old video card (NVIDIA geforce 280) died. I bought and installed a new video card: Radeon HD 7770. After this, my sound no longer worked in ubuntu (Win7 audio still works). Everything else in ubuntu, such as video, works fine. I suspect it has something to do with the fact that the Radeon card includes sound capability. Problem Details: If I click on System Settings - Sound, the panel freezes and stops responding indefinitely. The sound volume icon at the top of the screen (by the clock) shows 3 dashes beside it "---", and an empty drop-down box shows if I click on it. (Possibly related to 1.) When I reboot my machine, I get the message: "gnome settings daemon not responding". I have to force the reboot. I reinstalled ubunbu (perserving my home directory) and the problem persists. Diagnostics info: Following procedure outlined here: https://help.ubuntu.com/community/SoundTroubleshooting The following is a list of terminal commands, and their output: $ aplay -l List of PLAYBACK Hardware Devices There is no listing beyond that, and the command freezes until I hit control-c $ lspci -v | grep -A7 -i "audio" 00:0f.1 Audio device: NVIDIA Corporation MCP55 High Definition Audio (rev a2) Subsystem: Dell Device 0224 Flags: bus master, 66MHz, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 23 Memory at dfff0000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel -- 01:00.1 Audio device: Advanced Micro Devices [AMD] nee ATI Device aab0 Subsystem: Diamond Multimedia Systems Device aab0 Flags: bus master, fast devsel, latency 0, IRQ 43 Memory at dfefc000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Capabilities: <access denied> Kernel driver in use: snd_hda_intel Kernel modules: snd-hda-intel -- 03:0a.0 Audio device: Creative Labs SB X-Fi Subsystem: Creative Labs Device 6002 Flags: bus master, medium devsel, latency 32, IRQ 18 Memory at dbff4000 (32-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=16K] Memory at dbc00000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=2M] Memory at d4000000 (64-bit, non-prefetchable) [size=64M] I/O ports at 8c00 [size=32] Capabilities: <access denied> Notice the Diamond Multimedia Systems Device - that seems to be my video card sound. My video card is Diamond multimedia. Also there's the weird NVIDIA device in there. That must either be a remnant of my now removed NVIDIA graphics card, or else some kind of on-board thing. Not sure which. $ killall pulseaudio This allows me to open system settings - sound. But the "Test Sound" button makes no sound And the output volume + mute controls are greyed / disabled at 0 volume. It also allows me to click on the sound control in the "task bar" (beside the clock), and a volume slider drops down, but it is disabled / greyed at 0 volume. $ find /lib/modules/uname -r | grep snd /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-88pm860x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-tlv320aic3x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8900.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8978.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-tlv320dac33.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm9090.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-sta32x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-max98088.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-max9850.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-rt5631.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8903.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8580.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8523.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-max9877.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ads117x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8955.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8804.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-sgtl5000.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8750.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm2000.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-tlv320aic32x4.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ak4642.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ad193x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8753.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ak4535.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8985.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8350.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-dfbmcs320.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-cs42l51.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-tlv320aic26.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8737.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-uda1380.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8776.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8995.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-tpa6130a2.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8727.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm5100.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8991.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8510.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-jz4740-codec.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8400.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-lm4857.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8960.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-alc5623.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-cs4270.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-tlv320aic23.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8993.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8961.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8940.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-uda134x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ad1836.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8994.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8782.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-cs4271.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8974.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8983.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8962.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ak4641.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm-hubs.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8971.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8996.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wl1273.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-adav80x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-spdif.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-pcm3008.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-cx20442.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ak4671.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8711.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ad73311.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-max98095.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm9081.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8741.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm1250-ev1.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8988.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-adau1373.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8731.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-l3.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ssm2602.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-da7210.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-ak4104.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8904.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8728.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8770.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/codecs/snd-soc-wm8990.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/soc/snd-soc-core.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/synth/emux/snd-emux-synth.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/synth/snd-util-mem.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd-hrtimer.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd-hwdep.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd-pcm.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd-rawmidi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/oss/snd-mixer-oss.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd-page-alloc.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-midi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-dummy.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-virmidi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-device.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-midi-event.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/seq/snd-seq-midi-emul.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/core/snd-timer.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pcmcia/pdaudiocf/snd-pdaudiocf.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pcmcia/vx/snd-vxpocket.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/6fire/snd-usb-6fire.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/snd-usbmidi-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/caiaq/snd-usb-caiaq.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/usx2y/snd-usb-usx2y.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/usx2y/snd-usb-us122l.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/snd-usb-audio.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/usb/misc/snd-ua101.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/opl3/snd-opl3-synth.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/opl3/snd-opl3-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/opl4/snd-opl4-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/opl4/snd-opl4-synth.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-portman2x4.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-serial-u16550.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-mts64.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-mtpav.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/mpu401/snd-mpu401.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/mpu401/snd-mpu401-uart.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/vx/snd-vx-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-dummy.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-aloop.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/pcsp/snd-pcsp.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/drivers/snd-virmidi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/firewire/snd-firewire-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/firewire/snd-firewire-speakers.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/firewire/snd-isight.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/snd-tea6330t.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/other/snd-tea575x-tuner.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/other/snd-ak4113.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/other/snd-pt2258.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/other/snd-ak4117.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/other/snd-ak4xxx-adda.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/other/snd-ak4114.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/snd-cs8427.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/i2c/snd-i2c.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/emu10k1/snd-emu10k1-synth.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/emu10k1/snd-emu10k1.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/emu10k1/snd-emu10k1x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/korg1212/snd-korg1212.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/au88x0/snd-au8830.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/au88x0/snd-au8820.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/au88x0/snd-au8810.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/aw2/snd-aw2.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-sis7019.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1371.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/vx222/snd-vx222.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-via82xx.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-es1968.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-atiixp-modem.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-cs4281.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-sonicvibes.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-maestro3.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ac97/snd-ac97-codec.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-es1938.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-fm801.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/nm256/snd-nm256.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-realtek.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-cmedia.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-conexant.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-intel.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-analog.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-hdmi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-idt.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-ca0110.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-cirrus.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-via.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-ca0132.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec-si3054.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/hda/snd-hda-codec.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/riptide/snd-riptide.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ens1370.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-als4000.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-intel8x0m.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ca0106/snd-ca0106.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-cs5530.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/cs5535audio/snd-cs5535audio.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-rme32.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ymfpci/snd-ymfpci.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ctxfi/snd-ctxfi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-azt3328.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/cs46xx/snd-cs46xx.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/lx6464es/snd-lx6464es.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ice1712/snd-ice1712.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ice1712/snd-ice17xx-ak4xxx.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ice1712/snd-ice1724.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/mixart/snd-mixart.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/ali5451/snd-ali5451.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/lola/snd-lola.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/oxygen/snd-oxygen-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/oxygen/snd-oxygen.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/oxygen/snd-virtuoso.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-via82xx-modem.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/pcxhr/snd-pcxhr.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-indigo.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-echo3g.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-mona.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-layla20.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-gina20.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-layla24.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-mia.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-indigoiox.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-darla24.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-indigoio.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-indigodjx.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-gina24.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-darla20.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/echoaudio/snd-indigodj.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-cmipci.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/asihpi/snd-asihpi.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-ad1889.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/rme9652/snd-rme9652.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/rme9652/snd-hdspm.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/rme9652/snd-hdsp.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/trident/snd-trident.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-atiixp.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-als300.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-bt87x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/pci/snd-rme96.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/opti9xx/snd-miro.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/opti9xx/snd-opti92x-ad1848.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/opti9xx/snd-opti93x.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/opti9xx/snd-opti92x-cs4231.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/gus/snd-gusextreme.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/gus/snd-interwave.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/gus/snd-gusmax.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/gus/snd-interwave-stb.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/gus/snd-gus-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/gus/snd-gusclassic.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-emu8000-synth.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb16-dsp.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sbawe.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb8-dsp.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb-common.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb16.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb16-csp.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-sb8.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/sb/snd-jazz16.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-es18xx.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-azt2320.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-cmi8330.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-als100.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/msnd /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/msnd/snd-msnd-classic.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/msnd/snd-msnd-pinnacle.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/msnd/snd-msnd-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/cs423x/snd-cs4231.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/cs423x/snd-cs4236.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/es1688/snd-es1688-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/es1688/snd-es1688.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-adlib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/ad1848/snd-ad1848.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/ad1816a/snd-ad1816a.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/galaxy/snd-azt1605.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/galaxy/snd-azt2316.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/wavefront/snd-wavefront.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/wss/snd-wss-lib.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-sc6000.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-sscape.ko /lib/modules/3.2.0-29-generic-pae/kernel/sound/isa/snd-opl3sa2.ko

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  • help with fixing fwts errors log

    - by jasmines
    Here is an extract of results.log: MTRR validation. Test 1 of 3: Validate the kernel MTRR IOMEM setup. FAILED [MEDIUM] MTRRIncorrectAttr: Test 1, Memory range 0xc0000000 to 0xdfffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Combining. FAILED [MEDIUM] MTRRIncorrectAttr: Test 1, Memory range 0xfee01000 to 0xffffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Protect. ==================================================================================================== Test 1 of 1: Kernel log error check. Kernel message: [ 0.208079] [Firmware Bug]: ACPI: BIOS _OSI(Linux) query ignored ADVICE: This is not exactly a failure mode but a warning from the kernel. The _OSI() method has implemented a match to the 'Linux' query in the DSDT and this is redundant because the ACPI driver matches onto the Windows _OSI strings by default. FAILED [HIGH] KlogACPIErrorMethodExecutionParse: Test 1, HIGH Kernel message: [ 3.512783] ACPI Error : Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0._DOD] (Node f7425858), AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT (20110623/psparse-536) ADVICE: This is a bug picked up by the kernel, but as yet, the firmware test suite has no diagnostic advice for this particular problem. Found 1 unique errors in kernel log. ==================================================================================================== Check if system is using latest microcode. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Cannot read microcode file /usr/share/misc/intel-microcode.dat. Aborted test, initialisation failed. ==================================================================================================== MSR register tests. FAILED [MEDIUM] MSRCPUsInconsistent: Test 1, MSR SYSENTER_ESP (0x175) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0xffffffffffffffff). MSR CPU 0 -> 0xf7bb9c40 vs CPU 1 -> 0xf7bc7c40 FAILED [MEDIUM] MSRCPUsInconsistent: Test 1, MSR MISC_ENABLE (0x1a0) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0x400c51889). MSR CPU 0 -> 0x850088 vs CPU 1 -> 0x850089 ==================================================================================================== Checks firmware has set PCI Express MaxReadReq to a higher value on non-motherboard devices. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 1: Check firmware settings MaxReadReq for PCI Express devices. MaxReadReq for pci://00:00:1b.0 Audio device: Intel Corporation 82801I (ICH9 Family) HD Audio Controller (rev 03) is low (128) [Audio device]. MaxReadReq for pci://00:02:00.0 Network controller: Intel Corporation PRO/Wireless 5100 AGN [Shiloh] Network Connection is low (128) [Network controller]. FAILED [LOW] LowMaxReadReq: Test 1, 2 devices have low MaxReadReq settings. Firmware may have configured these too low. ADVICE: The MaxReadRequest size is set too low and will affect performance. It will provide excellent bus sharing at the cost of bus data transfer rates. Although not a critical issue, it may be worth considering setting the MaxReadRequest size to 256 or 512 to increase throughput on the PCI Express bus. Some drivers (for example the Brocade Fibre Channel driver) allow one to override the firmware settings. Where possible, this BIOS configuration setting is worth increasing it a little more for better performance at a small reduction of bus sharing. ==================================================================================================== PCIe ASPM check. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 2: PCIe ASPM ACPI test. PCIE ASPM is not controlled by Linux kernel. ADVICE: BIOS reports that Linux kernel should not modify ASPM settings that BIOS configured. It can be intentional because hardware vendors identified some capability bugs between the motherboard and the add-on cards. Test 2 of 2: PCIe ASPM registers test. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.01h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.01h L1 not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 02h:00h.00h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 02h:00h.00h L1 not enabled. PASSED: Test 2, PCIE aspm setting matched was matched. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.05h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, RP 00h:1Ch.05h L1 not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 85h:00h.00h L0s not enabled. WARNING: Test 2, Device 85h:00h.00h L1 not enabled. PASSED: Test 2, PCIE aspm setting matched was matched. ==================================================================================================== Extract and analyse Windows Management Instrumentation (WMI). Test 1 of 2: Check Windows Management Instrumentation in DSDT Found WMI Method WMAA with GUID: 5FB7F034-2C63-45E9-BE91-3D44E2C707E4, Instance 0x01 Found WMI Event, Notifier ID: 0x80, GUID: 95F24279-4D7B-4334-9387-ACCDC67EF61C, Instance 0x01 PASSED: Test 1, GUID 95F24279-4D7B-4334-9387-ACCDC67EF61C is handled by driver hp-wmi (Vendor: HP). Found WMI Event, Notifier ID: 0xa0, GUID: 2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0, Instance 0x01 FAILED [MEDIUM] WMIUnknownGUID: Test 1, GUID 2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0 is unknown to the kernel, a driver may need to be implemented for this GUID. ADVICE: A WMI driver probably needs to be written for this event. It can checked for using: wmi_has_guid("2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0"). One can install a notify handler using wmi_install_notify_handler("2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0", handler, NULL). http://lwn.net/Articles/391230 describes how to write an appropriate driver. Found WMI Object, Object ID AB, GUID: 05901221-D566-11D1-B2F0-00A0C9062910, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Method WMBA with GUID: 1F4C91EB-DC5C-460B-951D-C7CB9B4B8D5E, Instance 0x01 Found WMI Object, Object ID BC, GUID: 2D114B49-2DFB-4130-B8FE-4A3C09E75133, Instance 0x7f, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BD, GUID: 988D08E3-68F4-4C35-AF3E-6A1B8106F83C, Instance 0x19, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BE, GUID: 14EA9746-CE1F-4098-A0E0-7045CB4DA745, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BF, GUID: 322F2028-0F84-4901-988E-015176049E2D, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BG, GUID: 8232DE3D-663D-4327-A8F4-E293ADB9BF05, Instance 0x01, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BH, GUID: 8F1F6436-9F42-42C8-BADC-0E9424F20C9A, Instance 0x00, Flags: 00 Found WMI Object, Object ID BI, GUID: 8F1F6435-9F42-42C8-BADC-0E9424F20C9A, Instance 0x00, Flags: 00 Found WMI Method WMAC with GUID: 7391A661-223A-47DB-A77A-7BE84C60822D, Instance 0x01 Found WMI Object, Object ID BJ, GUID: DF4E63B6-3BBC-4858-9737-C74F82F821F3, Instance 0x05, Flags: 00 ==================================================================================================== Disassemble DSDT to check for _OSI("Linux"). ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 1: Disassemble DSDT to check for _OSI("Linux"). This is not strictly a failure mode, it just alerts one that this has been defined in the DSDT and probably should be avoided since the Linux ACPI driver matches onto the Windows _OSI strings { If (_OSI ("Linux")) { Store (0x03E8, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2001")) { Store (0x07D1, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2001 SP1")) { Store (0x07D1, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2001 SP2")) { Store (0x07D2, OSYS) } If (_OSI ("Windows 2006")) { Store (0x07D6, OSYS) } If (LAnd (MPEN, LEqual (OSYS, 0x07D1))) { TRAP (0x01, 0x48) } TRAP (0x03, 0x35) } WARNING: Test 1, DSDT implements a deprecated _OSI("Linux") test. ==================================================================================================== 0 passed, 0 failed, 1 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 info only. ==================================================================================================== ACPI DSDT Method Semantic Tests. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP Failed to install global event handler. Test 22 of 93: Check _PSR (Power Source). ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 22, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_SB_.AC__._PSR'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 22, \_SB_.AC__._PSR correctly acquired and released locks 16 times. Test 35 of 93: Check _TMP (Thermal Zone Current Temp). ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 35, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_TZ_.DTSZ._TMP'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.DTSZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 14 times. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 35, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_TZ_.CPUZ._TMP'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.CPUZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 10 times. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 35, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_TZ_.SKNZ._TMP'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.SKNZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 10 times. PASSED: Test 35, _TMP correctly returned sane looking value 0x00000b4c (289.2 degrees K) PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.BATZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 9 times. PASSED: Test 35, _TMP correctly returned sane looking value 0x00000aac (273.2 degrees K) PASSED: Test 35, \_TZ_.FDTZ._TMP correctly acquired and released locks 7 times. Test 46 of 93: Check _DIS (Disable). FAILED [MEDIUM] MethodShouldReturnNothing: Test 46, \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.COM1._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. Object returned: INTEGER: 0x00000000 ADVICE: This probably won't cause any errors, but it should be fixed as the AML code is not conforming to the expected behaviour as described in the ACPI specification. FAILED [MEDIUM] MethodShouldReturnNothing: Test 46, \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.LPT0._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. Object returned: INTEGER: 0x00000000 ADVICE: This probably won't cause any errors, but it should be fixed as the AML code is not conforming to the expected behaviour as described in the ACPI specification. Test 61 of 93: Check _WAK (System Wake). Test _WAK(1) System Wake, State S1. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(2) System Wake, State S2. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(3) System Wake, State S3. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(4) System Wake, State S4. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test _WAK(5) System Wake, State S5. ACPICA Exception AE_AML_INFINITE_LOOP during execution of method COMP WARNING: Test 61, Detected an infinite loop when evaluating method '\_WAK'. ADVICE: This may occur because we are emulating the execution in this test environment and cannot handshake with the embedded controller or jump to the BIOS via SMIs. However, the fact that AML code spins forever means that lockup conditions are not being checked for in the AML bytecode. Test 87 of 93: Check _BCL (Query List of Brightness Control Levels Supported). Package has 2 elements: 00: INTEGER: 0x00000000 01: INTEGER: 0x00000000 FAILED [MEDIUM] Method_BCLElementCount: Test 87, Method _BCL should return a package of more than 2 integers, got just 2. Test 88 of 93: Check _BCM (Set Brightness Level). ACPICA Exception AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT during execution of method _BCM FAILED [CRITICAL] AEAMLPackgeLimit: Test 88, Detected error 'Package limit' when evaluating '\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0.DD02._BCM'. ==================================================================================================== ACPI table settings sanity checks. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 1: Check ACPI tables. PASSED: Test 1, Table APIC passed. Table ECDT not present to check. FAILED [MEDIUM] FADT32And64BothDefined: Test 1, FADT 32 bit FIRMWARE_CONTROL is non-zero, and X_FIRMWARE_CONTROL is also non-zero. Section 5.2.9 of the ACPI specification states that if the FIRMWARE_CONTROL is non-zero then X_FIRMWARE_CONTROL must be set to zero. ADVICE: The FADT FIRMWARE_CTRL is a 32 bit pointer that points to the physical memory address of the Firmware ACPI Control Structure (FACS). There is also an extended 64 bit version of this, the X_FIRMWARE_CTRL pointer that also can point to the FACS. Section 5.2.9 of the ACPI specification states that if the X_FIRMWARE_CTRL field contains a non zero value then the FIRMWARE_CTRL field *must* be zero. This error is also detected by the Linux kernel. If FIRMWARE_CTRL and X_FIRMWARE_CTRL are defined, then the kernel just uses the 64 bit version of the pointer. PASSED: Test 1, Table HPET passed. PASSED: Test 1, Table MCFG passed. PASSED: Test 1, Table RSDT passed. PASSED: Test 1, Table RSDP passed. Table SBST not present to check. PASSED: Test 1, Table XSDT passed. ==================================================================================================== Re-assemble DSDT and find syntax errors and warnings. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Test 1 of 2: Disassemble and reassemble DSDT FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError4043: Test 1, Assembler error in line 2261 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02258| 0x00000000, // Range Minimum 02259| 0xFEDFFFFF, // Range Maximum 02260| 0x00000000, // Translation Offset 02261| 0x00000000, // Length | ^ | error 4043: Invalid combination of Length and Min/Max fixed flags 02262| ,, _Y0E, AddressRangeMemory, TypeStatic) 02263| DWordMemory (ResourceProducer, PosDecode, MinFixed, MaxFixed, Cacheable, ReadWrite, 02264| 0x00000000, // Granularity ==================================================================================================== ADVICE: (for error #4043): This occurs if the length is zero and just one of the resource MIF/MAF flags are set, or the length is non-zero and resource MIF/MAF flags are both set. These are illegal combinations and need to be fixed. See section 6.4.3.5 Address Space Resource Descriptors of version 4.0a of the ACPI specification for more details. FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError4050: Test 1, Assembler error in line 2268 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 02265| 0xFEE01000, // Range Minimum 02266| 0xFFFFFFFF, // Range Maximum 02267| 0x00000000, // Translation Offset 02268| 0x011FEFFF, // Length | ^ | error 4050: Length is not equal to fixed Min/Max window 02269| ,, , AddressRangeMemory, TypeStatic) 02270| }) 02271| Method (_CRS, 0, Serialized) ==================================================================================================== ADVICE: (for error #4050): The minimum address is greater than the maximum address. This is illegal. FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 1, Assembler error in line 8885 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 08882| Method (_DIS, 0, NotSerialized) 08883| { 08884| DSOD (0x02) 08885| Return (0x00) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_DIS) 08886| } 08887| 08888| Method (_SRS, 1, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 1, Assembler error in line 9195 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 09192| Method (_DIS, 0, NotSerialized) 09193| { 09194| DSOD (0x01) 09195| Return (0x00) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_DIS) 09196| } 09197| 09198| Method (_SRS, 1, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1127: Test 1, Assembler error in line 9242 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 09239| CreateWordField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y21._MAX, MAX2) 09240| CreateByteField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y21._LEN, LEN2) 09241| CreateWordField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y22._INT, IRQ0) 09242| CreateWordField (CRES, \_SB.PCI0.LPCB.SIO.LPT0._CRS._Y23._DMA, DMA0) | ^ | warning level 0 1127: ResourceTag smaller than Field (Tag: 8 bits, Field: 16 bits) 09243| If (RLPD) 09244| { 09245| Store (0x00, Local0) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1128: Test 1, Assembler error in line 18682 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 18679| Store (0x01, Index (DerefOf (Index (Local0, 0x02)), 0x01)) 18680| If (And (WDPE, 0x40)) 18681| { 18682| Wait (\_SB.BEVT, 0x10) | ^ | warning level 0 1128: Result is not used, possible operator timeout will be missed 18683| } 18684| 18685| Store (BRID, Index (DerefOf (Index (Local0, 0x02)), 0x02)) ==================================================================================================== ADVICE: (for warning level 0 #1128): The operation can possibly timeout, and hence the return value indicates an timeout error. However, because the return value is not checked this very probably indicates that the code is buggy. A possible scenario is that a mutex times out and the code attempts to access data in a critical region when it should not. This will lead to undefined behaviour. This should be fixed. Table DSDT (0) reassembly: Found 2 errors, 4 warnings. Test 2 of 2: Disassemble and reassemble SSDT PASSED: Test 2, SSDT (0) reassembly, Found 0 errors, 0 warnings. FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 60 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00057| { 00058| Store (CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00059| GCAP (Local0) 00060| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00061| } 00062| 00063| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 174 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00171| { 00172| Store (\_PR.CPU0.CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00173| GCAP (Local0) 00174| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00175| } 00176| 00177| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 244 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00241| { 00242| Store (\_PR.CPU0.CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00243| GCAP (Local0) 00244| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00245| } 00246| 00247| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== FAILED [HIGH] AMLAssemblerError1104: Test 2, Assembler error in line 290 Line | AML source ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- 00287| { 00288| Store (\_PR.CPU0.CPDC (Arg0), Local0) 00289| GCAP (Local0) 00290| Return (Local0) | ^ | warning level 0 1104: Reserved method should not return a value (_PDC) 00291| } 00292| 00293| Method (_OSC, 4, NotSerialized) ==================================================================================================== Table SSDT (1) reassembly: Found 0 errors, 4 warnings. PASSED: Test 2, SSDT (2) reassembly, Found 0 errors, 0 warnings. PASSED: Test 2, SSDT (3) reassembly, Found 0 errors, 0 warnings. ==================================================================================================== 3 passed, 10 failed, 0 warnings, 0 aborted, 0 skipped, 0 info only. ==================================================================================================== Critical failures: 1 method test, at 1 log line: 1449: Detected error 'Package limit' when evaluating '\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0.DD02._BCM'. High failures: 11 klog test, at 1 log line: 121: HIGH Kernel message: [ 3.512783] ACPI Error: Method parse/execution failed [\_SB_.PCI0.GFX0._DOD] (Node f7425858), AE_AML_PACKAGE_LIMIT (20110623/psparse-536) syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1668: Assembler error in line 2261 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1687: Assembler error in line 2268 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1703: Assembler error in line 8885 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1716: Assembler error in line 9195 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1729: Assembler error in line 9242 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1742: Assembler error in line 18682 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1766: Assembler error in line 60 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1779: Assembler error in line 174 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1792: Assembler error in line 244 syntaxcheck test, at 1 log line: 1805: Assembler error in line 290 Medium failures: 9 mtrr test, at 1 log line: 76: Memory range 0xc0000000 to 0xdfffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Combining. mtrr test, at 1 log line: 78: Memory range 0xfee01000 to 0xffffffff (PCI Bus 0000:00) has incorrect attribute Write-Protect. msr test, at 1 log line: 165: MSR SYSENTER_ESP (0x175) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0xffffffffffffffff). msr test, at 1 log line: 173: MSR MISC_ENABLE (0x1a0) has 1 inconsistent values across 2 CPUs for (shift: 0 mask: 0x400c51889). wmi test, at 1 log line: 528: GUID 2B814318-4BE8-4707-9D84-A190A859B5D0 is unknown to the kernel, a driver may need to be implemented for this GUID. method test, at 1 log line: 1002: \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.COM1._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. method test, at 1 log line: 1011: \_SB_.PCI0.LPCB.SIO_.LPT0._DIS returned values, but was expected to return nothing. method test, at 1 log line: 1443: Method _BCL should return a package of more than 2 integers, got just 2. acpitables test, at 1 log line: 1643: FADT 32 bit FIRMWARE_CONTROL is non-zero, and X_FIRMWARE_CONTROL is also non-zero. Se

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  • Selling Visual Studio ALM

    - by Tarun Arora
    Introduction As a consultant I have been selling Application Lifecycle Management services using Visual Studio and Team Foundation Server. I’ve been contacted various times by friends working in organization telling me that ALM processes in their company were benchmarked when dinosaurs walked the earth. Most of these individuals already know the great features Microsoft ALM tools offer and are keen to start a conversation with the CIO but don’t exactly know where to start. It is very important how you engage in your first conversation, if you start the conversation with ‘There is this great tooling from Microsoft which offers amazing features to boost developer productivity, … ‘ from experience I can tell you the reply from your CIO would be ‘I already know! Our existing landscape has a combination of bleeding edge open source and cutting edge licensed tools which already cover these features quite well, more over Microsoft products have a high licensing cost associated to them.’ You will always find it harder to sell by feature, the trick is to highlight the gap in the existing processes & tools and then highlight the impact of these gaps to the overall development processes, by now you would have captured enough attention to show off how the ALM tooling offered by Microsoft not only fills those gaps but offers great value adds to take their development practices to the next level. Rangers ALM Assessment Guide Image 1 – Welcome! First look at the Rangers ALM assessment guide Most organization already have some processes in place to cover aspects of ALM. How do you go about proving that there isn’t enough cover in place? This is where Visual Studio ALM Rangers ALM Assessment guide can help. The ALM assessment guide is really a tool that helps you gather information about Development practices and processes within a customer's environment. Several questionnaires are used to identify the current state of individual development lifecycle areas and decide on a desired state for those processes. It also presents guidance and roll-up summaries to help with recommendations moving forward. The ALM Rangers assessment guide can be downloaded from here. Image 2 – ALM Assessment guide divided into different functions of SDLC The assessment guide is divided into different functions of Software Development Lifecycle (listed below), this gives you the ability to access how mature the company is in different areas of SDLC. Architecture & Design Requirement Engineering & UX Development Software Configuration Management Governance Deployment & Operations Testing & Quality Assurance Project Planning & Management Each section has a set of questions, fill in the assessment by selecting “Never/Sometimes/Always” from the Answer column in the question sheets.  Each answer has weightage to the overall score. Each question has a link next to it, clicking the link takes you to the Reference sheet which gives you more details about the question along with a reason for “why you need to ask this question?”, “other ways to phrase the question” and “what to expect as an answer from the customer”. The trick is to engage the customer in a discussion. You need to probe a lot, listen to the customer and have a discussion with several team members, preferably without management to ensure that you receive candid feedback. This reminds me of a funny incident when during an ALM review a customer told me that they have a sophisticated semi-automated application deployment process, further discussions revealed that deployment actually involved 72 manual configuration steps per production node. Such observations can be recorded in the Issue Brainstorming worksheet for further consideration later. It is also worth mentioning the different levels of ALM maturity to the customer. By default the desired state of ALM maturity is set to Standard, it is possible to set a desired state by area, you should strive for Advanced or Dynamic, it always helps by explaining the classification and advantages. Image 3 – ALM levels by description The ALM assessment guide helps you arrive at a quantitative measure of the company’s ALM maturity. The resultant graph plotted on a spider’s web shows you the company’s current state of ALM maturity and the desired state of ALM maturity. Further since the results are classified by area you can immediately spot the areas where the customer needs immediate help. Image 4 – The spiders web! The red cross icons are areas shouting out for immediate attention, the yellow exclamation icons are areas that need improvement. These icons are calculated on the difference between the Current State of ALM maturity VS the Desired state of ALM maturity. Image 5 – Results by area Conclusion To conclude the Rangers ALM assessment guide gives you the ability to, Measure the customer’s current ALM maturity level Understand the ALM maturity level the customer desires to achieve Capture a healthy list of issues the customer wants to brainstorm further Now What’s next…? Download and get started with the Rangers ALM Assessment Guide. If you have successfully captured the above listed three pieces of information you are in a great state to make recommendations on the identified areas highlighting the benefits that Visual Studio ALM tools would offer. In the next post I will be covering how to take the ALM assessment results as the base to actually convert your recommendation into a sell.  Remember to subscribe to http://feeds.feedburner.com/TarunArora. I would love to hear your feedback! If you have any recommendations on things that I should consider or any questions or feedback, feel free to leave a comment. *** A special thanks goes out to fellow ranges Willy, Ethem and Philip for reviewing the blog post and providing valuable feedback. ***

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  • SQLAuthority News – Job Interviewing the Right Way (and for the Right Reasons) – Guest Post by Feodor Georgiev

    - by pinaldave
    Feodor Georgiev is a SQL Server database specialist with extensive experience of thinking both within and outside the box. He has wide experience of different systems and solutions in the fields of architecture, scalability, performance, etc. Feodor has experience with SQL Server 2000 and later versions, and is certified in SQL Server 2008. Feodor has written excellent article on Job Interviewing the Right Way. Here is his article in his own language. A while back I was thinking to start a blog post series on interviewing and employing IT personnel. At that time I had just read the ‘Smart and gets things done’ book (http://www.joelonsoftware.com/items/2007/06/05.html) and I was hyped up on some debatable topics regarding finding and employing the best people in the branch. I have no problem with hiring the best of the best; it’s just the definition of ‘the best of the best’ that makes things a bit more complicated. One of the fundamental books one can read on the topic of interviewing is the one mentioned above. If you have not read it, then you must do so; not because it contains the ultimate truth, and not because it gives the answers to most questions on the subject, but because the book contains an extensive set of questions about interviewing and employing people. Of course, a big part of these questions have different answers, depending on location, culture, available funds and so on. (What works in the US may not necessarily work in the Nordic countries or India, or it may work in a different way). The only thing that is valid regardless of any external factor is this: curiosity. In my belief there are two kinds of people – curious and not-so-curious; regardless of profession. Think about it – professional success is directly proportional to the individual’s curiosity + time of active experience in the field. (I say ‘active experience’ because vacations and any distractions do not count as experience :)  ) So, curiosity is the factor which will distinguish a good employee from the not-so-good one. But let’s shift our attention to something else for now: a few tips and tricks for successful interviews. Tip and trick #1: get your priorities straight. Your status usually dictates your priorities; for example, if the person looking for a job has just relocated to a new country, they might tend to ignore some of their priorities and overload others. In other words, setting priorities straight means to define the personal criteria by which the interview process is lead. For example, similar to the following questions can help define the criteria for someone looking for a job: How badly do I need a (any) job? Is it more important to work in a clean and quiet environment or is it important to get paid well (or both, if possible)? And so on… Furthermore, before going to the interview, the candidate should have a list of priorities, sorted by the most importance: e.g. I want a quiet environment, x amount of money, great helping boss, a desk next to a window and so on. Also it is a good idea to be prepared and know which factors can be compromised and to what extent. Tip and trick #2: the interview is a two-way street. A job candidate should not forget that the interview process is not a one-way street. What I mean by this is that while the employer is interviewing the potential candidate, the job seeker should not miss the chance to interview the employer. Usually, the employer and the candidate will meet for an interview and talk about a variety of topics. In a quality interview the candidate will be presented to key members of the team and will have the opportunity to ask them questions. By asking the right questions both parties will define their opinion about each other. For example, if the candidate talks to one of the potential bosses during the interview process and they notice that the potential manager has a hard time formulating a question, then it is up to the candidate to decide whether working with such person is a red flag for them. There are as many interview processes out there as there are companies and each one is different. Some bigger companies and corporates can afford pre-selection processes, 3 or even 4 stages of interviews, small companies usually settle with one interview. Some companies even give cognitive tests on the interview. Why not? In his book Joel suggests that a good candidate should be pampered and spoiled beyond belief with a week-long vacation in New York, fancy hotels, food and who knows what. For all I can imagine, an interview might even take place at the top of the Eifel tower (right, Mr. Joel, right?) I doubt, however, that this is the optimal way to capture the attention of a good employee. The ‘curiosity’ topic What I have learned so far in my professional experience is that opinions can be subjective. Plus, opinions on technology subjects can also be subjective. According to Joel, only hiring the best of the best is worth it. If you ask me, there is no such thing as best of the best, simply because human nature (well, aside from some physical limitations, like putting your pants on through your head :) ) has no boundaries. And why would it have boundaries? I have seen many curious and interesting people, naturally good at technology, though uninterested in it as one  can possibly be; I have also seen plenty of people interested in technology, who (in an ideal world) should have stayed far from it. At any rate, all of this sums up at the end to the ‘supply and demand’ factor. The interview process big-bang boils down to this: If there is a mutual benefit for both the employer and the potential employee to work together, then it all sorts out nicely. If there is no benefit, then it is much harder to get to a common place. Tip and trick #3: word-of-mouth is worth a thousand words Here I would just mention that the best thing a job candidate can get during the interview process is access to future team members or other employees of the new company. Nowadays the world has become quite small and everyone knows everyone. Look at LinkedIn, look at other professional networks and you will realize how small the world really is. Knowing people is a good way to become more approachable and to approach them. Tip and trick #4: Be confident. It is true that for some people confidence is as natural as breathing and others have to work hard to express it. Confidence is, however, a key factor in convincing the other side (potential employer or employee) that there is a great chance for success by working together. But it cannot get you very far if it’s not backed up by talent, curiosity and knowledge. Tip and trick #5: The right reasons What really bothers me in Sweden (and I am sure that there are similar situations in other countries) is that there is a tendency to fill quotas and to filter out candidates by criteria different from their skill and knowledge. In job ads I see quite often the phrases ‘positive thinker’, ‘team player’ and many similar hints about personality features. So my guess here is that discrimination has evolved to a new level. Let me clear up the definition of discrimination: ‘unfair treatment of a person or group on the basis of prejudice’. And prejudice is the ‘partiality that prevents objective consideration of an issue or situation’. In other words, there is not much difference whether a job candidate is filtered out by race, gender or by personality features – it is all a bad habit. And in reality, there is no proven correlation between the technology knowledge paired with skills and the personal features (gender, race, age, optimism). It is true that a significantly greater number of Darwin awards were given to men than to women, but I am sure that somewhere there is a paper or theory explaining the genetics behind this. J This topic actually brings to mind one of my favorite work related stories. A while back I was working for a big company with many teams involved in their processes. One of the teams was occupying 2 rooms – one had the team members and was full of light, colorful posters, chit-chats and giggles, whereas the other room was dark, lighted only by a single monitor with a quiet person in front of it. Later on I realized that the ‘dark room’ person was the guru and the ultimate problem-solving-brain who did not like the chats and giggles and hence was in a separate room. In reality, all severe problems which the chatty and cheerful team members could not solve and all emergencies were directed to ‘the dark room’. And thus all worked out well. The moral of the story: Personality has nothing to do with technology knowledge and skills. End of story. Summary: I’d like to stress the fact that there is no ultimately perfect candidate for a job, and there is no such thing as ‘best-of-the-best’. From my personal experience, the main criteria by which I measure people (co-workers and bosses) is the curiosity factor; I know from experience that the more curious and inventive a person is, the better chances there are for great achievements in their field. Related stories: (for extra credit) 1) Get your priorities straight. A while back as a consultant I was working for a few days at a time at different offices and for different clients, and so I was able to compare and analyze the work environments. There were two different places which I compared and recently I asked a friend of mine the following question: “Which one would you prefer as a work environment: a noisy office full of people, or a quiet office full of faulty smells because the office is rarely cleaned?” My friend was puzzled for a while, thought about it and said: “Hmm, you are talking about two different kinds of pollution… I will probably choose the second, since I can clean the workplace myself a bit…” 2) The interview is a two-way street. One time, during a job interview, I met a potential boss that had a hard time phrasing a question. At that particular time it was clear to me that I would not have liked to work under this person. According to my work religion, the properly asked question contains at least half of the answer. And if I work with someone who cannot ask a question… then I’d be doing double or triple work. At another interview, after the technical part with the team leader of the department, I was introduced to one of the team members and we were left alone for 5 minutes. I immediately jumped on the occasion and asked the blunt question: ‘What have you learned here for the past year and how do you like your job?’ The team member looked at me and said ‘Nothing really. I like playing with my cats at home, so I am out of here at 5pm and I don’t have time for much.’ I was disappointed at the time and I did not take the job offer. I wasn’t that shocked a few months later when the company went bankrupt. 3) The right reasons to take a job: personality check. A while back I was asked to serve as a job reference for a coworker. I agreed, and after some weeks I got a phone call from the company where my colleague was applying for a job. The conversation started with the manager’s question about my colleague’s personality and about their social skills. (You can probably guess what my internal reaction was… J ) So, after 30 minutes of pouring common sense into the interviewer’s head, we finally agreed on the fact that a shy or quiet personality has nothing to do with work skills and knowledge. Some years down the road my former colleague is taking the manager’s position as the manager is demoted to a different department. Reference: Feodor Georgiev, Pinal Dave (http://blog.SQLAuthority.com) Filed under: PostADay, Readers Contribution, SQL, SQL Authority, SQL Query, SQL Server, SQL Tips and Tricks, T SQL, Technology

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  • PTLQueue : a scalable bounded-capacity MPMC queue

    - by Dave
    Title: Fast concurrent MPMC queue -- I've used the following concurrent queue algorithm enough that it warrants a blog entry. I'll sketch out the design of a fast and scalable multiple-producer multiple-consumer (MPSC) concurrent queue called PTLQueue. The queue has bounded capacity and is implemented via a circular array. Bounded capacity can be a useful property if there's a mismatch between producer rates and consumer rates where an unbounded queue might otherwise result in excessive memory consumption by virtue of the container nodes that -- in some queue implementations -- are used to hold values. A bounded-capacity queue can provide flow control between components. Beware, however, that bounded collections can also result in resource deadlock if abused. The put() and take() operators are partial and wait for the collection to become non-full or non-empty, respectively. Put() and take() do not allocate memory, and are not vulnerable to the ABA pathologies. The PTLQueue algorithm can be implemented equally well in C/C++ and Java. Partial operators are often more convenient than total methods. In many use cases if the preconditions aren't met, there's nothing else useful the thread can do, so it may as well wait via a partial method. An exception is in the case of work-stealing queues where a thief might scan a set of queues from which it could potentially steal. Total methods return ASAP with a success-failure indication. (It's tempting to describe a queue or API as blocking or non-blocking instead of partial or total, but non-blocking is already an overloaded concurrency term. Perhaps waiting/non-waiting or patient/impatient might be better terms). It's also trivial to construct partial operators by busy-waiting via total operators, but such constructs may be less efficient than an operator explicitly and intentionally designed to wait. A PTLQueue instance contains an array of slots, where each slot has volatile Turn and MailBox fields. The array has power-of-two length allowing mod/div operations to be replaced by masking. We assume sensible padding and alignment to reduce the impact of false sharing. (On x86 I recommend 128-byte alignment and padding because of the adjacent-sector prefetch facility). Each queue also has PutCursor and TakeCursor cursor variables, each of which should be sequestered as the sole occupant of a cache line or sector. You can opt to use 64-bit integers if concerned about wrap-around aliasing in the cursor variables. Put(null) is considered illegal, but the caller or implementation can easily check for and convert null to a distinguished non-null proxy value if null happens to be a value you'd like to pass. Take() will accordingly convert the proxy value back to null. An advantage of PTLQueue is that you can use atomic fetch-and-increment for the partial methods. We initialize each slot at index I with (Turn=I, MailBox=null). Both cursors are initially 0. All shared variables are considered "volatile" and atomics such as CAS and AtomicFetchAndIncrement are presumed to have bidirectional fence semantics. Finally T is the templated type. I've sketched out a total tryTake() method below that allows the caller to poll the queue. tryPut() has an analogous construction. Zebra stripping : alternating row colors for nice-looking code listings. See also google code "prettify" : https://code.google.com/p/google-code-prettify/ Prettify is a javascript module that yields the HTML/CSS/JS equivalent of pretty-print. -- pre:nth-child(odd) { background-color:#ff0000; } pre:nth-child(even) { background-color:#0000ff; } border-left: 11px solid #ccc; margin: 1.7em 0 1.7em 0.3em; background-color:#BFB; font-size:12px; line-height:65%; " // PTLQueue : Put(v) : // producer : partial method - waits as necessary assert v != null assert Mask = 1 && (Mask & (Mask+1)) == 0 // Document invariants // doorway step // Obtain a sequence number -- ticket // As a practical concern the ticket value is temporally unique // The ticket also identifies and selects a slot auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&PutCursor, 1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // waiting phase : // wait for slot's generation to match the tkt value assigned to this put() invocation. // The "generation" is implicitly encoded as the upper bits in the cursor // above those used to specify the index : tkt div (Mask+1) // The generation serves as an epoch number to identify a cohort of threads // accessing disjoint slots while s-Turn != tkt : Pause assert s-MailBox == null s-MailBox = v // deposit and pass message Take() : // consumer : partial method - waits as necessary auto tkt = AtomicFetchIncrement (&TakeCursor,1) slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] // 2-stage waiting : // First wait for turn for our generation // Acquire exclusive "take" access to slot's MailBox field // Then wait for the slot to become occupied while s-Turn != tkt : Pause // Concurrency in this section of code is now reduced to just 1 producer thread // vs 1 consumer thread. // For a given queue and slot, there will be most one Take() operation running // in this section. // Consumer waits for producer to arrive and make slot non-empty // Extract message; clear mailbox; advance Turn indicator // We have an obvious happens-before relation : // Put(m) happens-before corresponding Take() that returns that same "m" for T v = s-MailBox if v != null : s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 // unlock slot to admit next producer and consumer return v Pause tryTake() : // total method - returns ASAP with failure indication for auto tkt = TakeCursor slot * s = &Slots[tkt & Mask] if s-Turn != tkt : return null T v = s-MailBox // presumptive return value if v == null : return null // ratify tkt and v values and commit by advancing cursor if CAS (&TakeCursor, tkt, tkt+1) != tkt : continue s-MailBox = null ST-ST barrier s-Turn = tkt + Mask + 1 return v The basic idea derives from the Partitioned Ticket Lock "PTL" (US20120240126-A1) and the MultiLane Concurrent Bag (US8689237). The latter is essentially a circular ring-buffer where the elements themselves are queues or concurrent collections. You can think of the PTLQueue as a partitioned ticket lock "PTL" augmented to pass values from lock to unlock via the slots. Alternatively, you could conceptualize of PTLQueue as a degenerate MultiLane bag where each slot or "lane" consists of a simple single-word MailBox instead of a general queue. Each lane in PTLQueue also has a private Turn field which acts like the Turn (Grant) variables found in PTL. Turn enforces strict FIFO ordering and restricts concurrency on the slot mailbox field to at most one simultaneous put() and take() operation. PTL uses a single "ticket" variable and per-slot Turn (grant) fields while MultiLane has distinct PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors and abstract per-slot sub-queues. Both PTL and MultiLane advance their cursor and ticket variables with atomic fetch-and-increment. PTLQueue borrows from both PTL and MultiLane and has distinct put and take cursors and per-slot Turn fields. Instead of a per-slot queues, PTLQueue uses a simple single-word MailBox field. PutCursor and TakeCursor act like a pair of ticket locks, conferring "put" and "take" access to a given slot. PutCursor, for instance, assigns an incoming put() request to a slot and serves as a PTL "Ticket" to acquire "put" permission to that slot's MailBox field. To better explain the operation of PTLQueue we deconstruct the operation of put() and take() as follows. Put() first increments PutCursor obtaining a new unique ticket. That ticket value also identifies a slot. Put() next waits for that slot's Turn field to match that ticket value. This is tantamount to using a PTL to acquire "put" permission on the slot's MailBox field. Finally, having obtained exclusive "put" permission on the slot, put() stores the message value into the slot's MailBox. Take() similarly advances TakeCursor, identifying a slot, and then acquires and secures "take" permission on a slot by waiting for Turn. Take() then waits for the slot's MailBox to become non-empty, extracts the message, and clears MailBox. Finally, take() advances the slot's Turn field, which releases both "put" and "take" access to the slot's MailBox. Note the asymmetry : put() acquires "put" access to the slot, but take() releases that lock. At any given time, for a given slot in a PTLQueue, at most one thread has "put" access and at most one thread has "take" access. This restricts concurrency from general MPMC to 1-vs-1. We have 2 ticket locks -- one for put() and one for take() -- each with its own "ticket" variable in the form of the corresponding cursor, but they share a single "Grant" egress variable in the form of the slot's Turn variable. Advancing the PutCursor, for instance, serves two purposes. First, we obtain a unique ticket which identifies a slot. Second, incrementing the cursor is the doorway protocol step to acquire the per-slot mutual exclusion "put" lock. The cursors and operations to increment those cursors serve double-duty : slot-selection and ticket assignment for locking the slot's MailBox field. At any given time a slot MailBox field can be in one of the following states: empty with no pending operations -- neutral state; empty with one or more waiting take() operations pending -- deficit; occupied with no pending operations; occupied with one or more waiting put() operations -- surplus; empty with a pending put() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional; or occupied with a pending take() or pending put() and take() operations -- transitional. The partial put() and take() operators can be implemented with an atomic fetch-and-increment operation, which may confer a performance advantage over a CAS-based loop. In addition we have independent PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors. Critically, a put() operation modifies PutCursor but does not access the TakeCursor and a take() operation modifies the TakeCursor cursor but does not access the PutCursor. This acts to reduce coherence traffic relative to some other queue designs. It's worth noting that slow threads or obstruction in one slot (or "lane") does not impede or obstruct operations in other slots -- this gives us some degree of obstruction isolation. PTLQueue is not lock-free, however. The implementation above is expressed with polite busy-waiting (Pause) but it's trivial to implement per-slot parking and unparking to deschedule waiting threads. It's also easy to convert the queue to a more general deque by replacing the PutCursor and TakeCursor cursors with Left/Front and Right/Back cursors that can move either direction. Specifically, to push and pop from the "left" side of the deque we would decrement and increment the Left cursor, respectively, and to push and pop from the "right" side of the deque we would increment and decrement the Right cursor, respectively. We used a variation of PTLQueue for message passing in our recent OPODIS 2013 paper. ul { list-style:none; padding-left:0; padding:0; margin:0; margin-left:0; } ul#myTagID { padding: 0px; margin: 0px; list-style:none; margin-left:0;} -- -- There's quite a bit of related literature in this area. I'll call out a few relevant references: Wilson's NYU Courant Institute UltraComputer dissertation from 1988 is classic and the canonical starting point : Operating System Data Structures for Shared-Memory MIMD Machines with Fetch-and-Add. Regarding provenance and priority, I think PTLQueue or queues effectively equivalent to PTLQueue have been independently rediscovered a number of times. See CB-Queue and BNPBV, below, for instance. But Wilson's dissertation anticipates the basic idea and seems to predate all the others. Gottlieb et al : Basic Techniques for the Efficient Coordination of Very Large Numbers of Cooperating Sequential Processors Orozco et al : CB-Queue in Toward high-throughput algorithms on many-core architectures which appeared in TACO 2012. Meneghin et al : BNPVB family in Performance evaluation of inter-thread communication mechanisms on multicore/multithreaded architecture Dmitry Vyukov : bounded MPMC queue (highly recommended) Alex Otenko : US8607249 (highly related). John Mellor-Crummey : Concurrent queues: Practical fetch-and-phi algorithms. Technical Report 229, Department of Computer Science, University of Rochester Thomasson : FIFO Distributed Bakery Algorithm (very similar to PTLQueue). Scott and Scherer : Dual Data Structures I'll propose an optimization left as an exercise for the reader. Say we wanted to reduce memory usage by eliminating inter-slot padding. Such padding is usually "dark" memory and otherwise unused and wasted. But eliminating the padding leaves us at risk of increased false sharing. Furthermore lets say it was usually the case that the PutCursor and TakeCursor were numerically close to each other. (That's true in some use cases). We might still reduce false sharing by incrementing the cursors by some value other than 1 that is not trivially small and is coprime with the number of slots. Alternatively, we might increment the cursor by one and mask as usual, resulting in a logical index. We then use that logical index value to index into a permutation table, yielding an effective index for use in the slot array. The permutation table would be constructed so that nearby logical indices would map to more distant effective indices. (Open question: what should that permutation look like? Possibly some perversion of a Gray code or De Bruijn sequence might be suitable). As an aside, say we need to busy-wait for some condition as follows : "while C == 0 : Pause". Lets say that C is usually non-zero, so we typically don't wait. But when C happens to be 0 we'll have to spin for some period, possibly brief. We can arrange for the code to be more machine-friendly with respect to the branch predictors by transforming the loop into : "if C == 0 : for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }". Critically, we want to restructure the loop so there's one branch that controls entry and another that controls loop exit. A concern is that your compiler or JIT might be clever enough to transform this back to "while C == 0 : Pause". You can sometimes avoid this by inserting a call to a some type of very cheap "opaque" method that the compiler can't elide or reorder. On Solaris, for instance, you could use :"if C == 0 : { gethrtime(); for { Pause; if C != 0 : break; }}". It's worth noting the obvious duality between locks and queues. If you have strict FIFO lock implementation with local spinning and succession by direct handoff such as MCS or CLH,then you can usually transform that lock into a queue. Hidden commentary and annotations - invisible : * And of course there's a well-known duality between queues and locks, but I'll leave that topic for another blog post. * Compare and contrast : PTLQ vs PTL and MultiLane * Equivalent : Turn; seq; sequence; pos; position; ticket * Put = Lock; Deposit Take = identify and reserve slot; wait; extract & clear; unlock * conceptualize : Distinct PutLock and TakeLock implemented as ticket lock or PTL Distinct arrival cursors but share per-slot "Turn" variable provides exclusive role-based access to slot's mailbox field put() acquires exclusive access to a slot for purposes of "deposit" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires deposit access rights/perms to that slot take() acquires exclusive access to slot for purposes of "withdrawal" assigns slot round-robin and then acquires withdrawal access rights/perms to that slot At any given time, only one thread can have withdrawal access to a slot at any given time, only one thread can have deposit access to a slot Permissible for T1 to have deposit access and T2 to simultaneously have withdrawal access * round-robin for the purposes of; role-based; access mode; access role mailslot; mailbox; allocate/assign/identify slot rights; permission; license; access permission; * PTL/Ticket hybrid Asymmetric usage ; owner oblivious lock-unlock pairing K-exclusion add Grant cursor pass message m from lock to unlock via Slots[] array Cursor performs 2 functions : + PTL ticket + Assigns request to slot in round-robin fashion Deconstruct protocol : explication put() : allocate slot in round-robin fashion acquire PTL for "put" access store message into slot associated with PTL index take() : Acquire PTL for "take" access // doorway step seq = fetchAdd (&Grant, 1) s = &Slots[seq & Mask] // waiting phase while s-Turn != seq : pause Extract : wait for s-mailbox to be full v = s-mailbox s-mailbox = null Release PTL for both "put" and "take" access s-Turn = seq + Mask + 1 * Slot round-robin assignment and lock "doorway" protocol leverage the same cursor and FetchAdd operation on that cursor FetchAdd (&Cursor,1) + round-robin slot assignment and dispersal + PTL/ticket lock "doorway" step waiting phase is via "Turn" field in slot * PTLQueue uses 2 cursors -- put and take. Acquire "put" access to slot via PTL-like lock Acquire "take" access to slot via PTL-like lock 2 locks : put and take -- at most one thread can access slot's mailbox Both locks use same "turn" field Like multilane : 2 cursors : put and take slot is simple 1-capacity mailbox instead of queue Borrow per-slot turn/grant from PTL Provides strict FIFO Lock slot : put-vs-put take-vs-take at most one put accesses slot at any one time at most one put accesses take at any one time reduction to 1-vs-1 instead of N-vs-M concurrency Per slot locks for put/take Release put/take by advancing turn * is instrumental in ... * P-V Semaphore vs lock vs K-exclusion * See also : FastQueues-excerpt.java dice-etc/queue-mpmc-bounded-blocking-circular-xadd/ * PTLQueue is the same as PTLQB - identical * Expedient return; ASAP; prompt; immediately * Lamport's Bakery algorithm : doorway step then waiting phase Threads arriving at doorway obtain a unique ticket number Threads enter in ticket order * In the terminology of Reed and Kanodia a ticket lock corresponds to the busy-wait implementation of a semaphore using an eventcount and a sequencer It can also be thought of as an optimization of Lamport's bakery lock was designed for fault-tolerance rather than performance Instead of spinning on the release counter, processors using a bakery lock repeatedly examine the tickets of their peers --

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  • The design of a generic data synchronizer, or, an [object] that does [actions] with the aid of [helpers]

    - by acheong87
    I'd like to create a generic data-source "synchronizer," where data-source "types" may include MySQL databases, Google Spreadsheets documents, CSV files, among others. I've been trying to figure out how to structure this in terms of classes and interfaces, keeping in mind (what I've read about) composition vs. inheritance and is-a vs. has-a, but each route I go down seems to violate some principle. For simplicity, assume that all data-sources have a header-row-plus-data-rows format. For example, assume that the first rows of Google Spreadsheets documents and CSV files will have column headers, a.k.a. "fields" (to parallel database fields). Also, eventually, I would like to implement this in PHP, but avoiding language-specific discussion would probably be more productive. Here's an overview of what I've tried. Part 1/4: ISyncable class CMySQL implements ISyncable GetFields() // sql query, pdo statement, whatever AddFields() RemFields() ... _dbh class CGoogleSpreadsheets implements ISyncable GetFields() // zend gdata api AddFields() RemFields() ... _spreadsheetKey _worksheetId class CCsvFile implements ISyncable GetFields() // read from buffer AddFields() RemFields() ... _buffer interface ISyncable GetFields() AddFields($field1, $field2, ...) RemFields($field1, $field2, ...) ... CanAddFields() // maybe the spreadsheet is locked for write, or CanRemFields() // maybe no permission to alter a database table ... AddRow() ModRow() RemRow() ... Open() Close() ... First Question: Does it make sense to use an interface, as above? Part 2/4: CSyncer Next, the thing that does the syncing. class CSyncer __construct(ISyncable $A, ISyncable $B) Push() // sync A to B Pull() // sync B to A Sync() // Push() and Pull() only differ in direction; factor. // Sync()'s job is to make sure that the fields on each side // match, to add fields where appropriate and possible, to // account for different column-orderings, etc., and of // course, to add and remove rows as necessary to sync. ... _A _B Second Question: Does it make sense to define such a class, or am I treading dangerously close to the "Kingdom of Nouns"? Part 3/4: CTranslator? ITranslator? Now, here's where I actually get lost, assuming the above is passable. Sometimes, two ISyncables speak different "dialects." For example, believe it or not, Google Spreadsheets (accessed through the Google Data API "list feed") returns column headers lower-cased and stripped of all spaces and symbols! That is, sys_TIMESTAMP is systimestamp, as far as my code can tell. (Yes, I am aware that the "cell feed" does not strip the name so; however cell-by-cell manipulation is too slow for what I'm doing.) One can imagine other hypothetical examples. Perhaps even the data itself can be in different "dialects." But let's take it as given for now, and not argue this if possible. Third Question: How would you implement "translation"? Note: Taking all this as an exercise, I'm more interested in the "idealized" design, rather than the practical one. (God knows that shipped sailed when I began this project.) Part 4/4: Further Thought Here's my train of thought to demonstrate I've thunk, albeit unfruitfully: First, I thought, primitively, "I'll just modify CMySQL::GetFields() to lower-case and strip field names so they're compatible with Google Spreadsheets." But of course, then my class should really be called, CMySQLForGoogleSpreadsheets, and that can't be right. So, the thing which translates must exist outside of an ISyncable implementor. And surely it can't be right to make each translation a method in CSyncer. If it exists outside of both ISyncable and CSyncer, then what is it? (Is it even an "it"?) Is it an abstract class, i.e. abstract CTranslator? Is it an interface, since a translator only does, not has, i.e. interface ITranslator? Does it even require instantiation? e.g. If it's an ITranslator, then should its translation methods be static? (I learned what "late static binding" meant, today.) And, dear God, whatever it is, how should a CSyncer use it? Does it "have" it? Is it, "it"? Who am I? ...am I, "I"? I've attempted to break up the question into sub-questions, but essentially my question is singular: How does one implement an object A that conceptually "links" (has) two objects b1 and b2 that share a common interface B, where certain pairs of b1 and b2 require a helper, e.g. a translator, to be handled by A? Something tells me that I've overcomplicated this design, or violated a principle much higher up. Thank you all very much for your time and any advice you can provide.

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  • Visual Studio 2010 Web Deployment

    - by Cranialsurge
    I am trying to use VS2010's 1-Click Publish feature to deploy a test site from my laptop to my server. I have the firewall turned off on both machines and the MS Deployment Service is up and running on both my laptop and the server. However when I try and publish from VS2010 on my laptop I get the following error Error 1 Web deployment task failed.(Remote agent (URL https://192.168.1.181/:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=LocationsTest) could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer.) The requested resource does not exist, or the requested URL is incorrect. Error details: Remote agent (URL https://192.168.1.181/:8172/msdeploy.axd?site=LocationsTest) could not be contacted. Make sure the remote agent service is installed and started on the target computer. An unsupported response was received. The response header 'MSDeploy.Response' was '' but 'v1' was expected. The remote server returned an error: (404) Not Found. 0 0 Test.Web Any idea what I am doing wrong here ?

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  • Iterating through StaticResource loaded by ResourceDictionary

    - by akaphenom
    Given a resource dictionary loading some static resources into memory - is there any way to iterate through theResources loaded into memory? My silverlight application keeps telling me it cannot find a static resource. I wonder if I have a naming convention issue or somehting - was hoping iterating through the resources in memory would help diagnose any issue... I have the following app.xaml <Application xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml" x:Class="Module1.MyApp"> <Application.Resources> <ResourceDictionary> <ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> <ResourceDictionary Source="/FSSilverlightApp;component/TransitioningFrame.xaml" /> </ResourceDictionary.MergedDictionaries> </ResourceDictionary> </Application.Resources> </Application> and content template: <ResourceDictionary xmlns="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml/presentation" xmlns:navigation="clr-namespace:System.Windows.Controls;assembly=System.Windows.Controls.Navigation" xmlns:x="http://schemas.microsoft.com/winfx/2006/xaml"> <ControlTemplate x:Key="TransitioningFrame" TargetType="navigation:Frame"> <Border Background="{TemplateBinding Background}" BorderBrush="{TemplateBinding BorderBrush}" BorderThickness="{TemplateBinding BorderThickness}" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}"> <ContentPresenter Cursor="{TemplateBinding Cursor}" HorizontalAlignment="{TemplateBinding HorizontalContentAlignment}" Margin="{TemplateBinding Padding}" VerticalAlignment="{TemplateBinding VerticalContentAlignment}" Content="{TemplateBinding Content}"/> </Border> </ControlTemplate> </ResourceDictionary>

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