In this Linux tip, learn how to use the dmesg command. It's a command that displays the content of the kernel message buffer – messages that were sent by various system services such as device drivers. You can view a lot of information that you would normally not see and get insights into how your system is working.
Five years ago, AMD was hanging on by a thread. Sales had dropped below $1 billion per quarter. Its client and server CPUs were no longer competitive with Intel’s. Its Opteron server-CPU market share was less than one percent. Its GPU products were a little better but Nvidia had the mindshare.Then two things happened: Dr. Lisa Su ascended to the CEO position, and it developed the Zen microarchitecture, a clean-sheet, from-scratch redesign of the x86 architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The result? Epyc server processors now account for somewhere between 10% market share, as per Mercury Research, and 16%, as per Omdia. The AMD Ryzen desktop processor is the CPU of choice for gamers. And in Q3 of 2021, AMD reported sales of $4 billion, more in one quarter than AMD did in all of fiscal 2015 ($3.9 billion).To read this article in full, please click here
Five years ago, AMD was hanging on by a thread. Sales had dropped below $1 billion per quarter. Its client and server CPUs were no longer competitive with Intel’s. Its Opteron server-CPU market share was less than one percent. Its GPU products were a little better but Nvidia had the mindshare.Then two things happened: Dr. Lisa Su ascended to the CEO position, and it developed the Zen microarchitecture, a clean-sheet, from-scratch redesign of the x86 architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The result? Epyc server processors now account for somewhere between 10% market share, as per Mercury Research, and 16%, as per Omdia. The AMD Ryzen desktop processor is the CPU of choice for gamers. And in Q3 of 2021, AMD reported sales of $4 billion, more in one quarter than AMD did in all of fiscal 2015 ($3.9 billion).To read this article in full, please click here
The whois and jwhois commands allow you to retrieve a lot of information on Internet domains--likely a lot more than you might imagine. Here's how these commands work and how they can be useful.To get started, you probably already use nslookup to check on domain names. When you do, you'll see output like this:$ nslookup networkworld.com
Server: 127.0.0.53
Address: 127.0.0.53#53
Non-authoritative answer:
Name: networkworld.com
Address: 151.101.2.165
Name: networkworld.com
Address: 151.101.66.165
Name: networkworld.com
Address: 151.101.194.165
Name: networkworld.com
Address: 151.101.130.165
The nslookup command queries name servers, so its output provides IP addresses for the queried domain and verifies the domain name is valid, but whois commands provide extensive details on the domain registration, domain status, responsible organizations, their locations, etc., giving you a lot more insight into domains.To read this article in full, please click here
The proposed Nvidia-Arm merger had another roadblock thrown in front of it when the US Federal Trade Commission’s filed a lawsuit objecting to the $40 billion deal last week.The acquisition met with almost immediate opposition from UK entities when it was announced in September 2020. Now, 15 months laster the FTC weighs in and has set an administrative trial for Aug. 9, 2022.“Tomorrow’s technologies depend on preserving today’s competitive, cutting-edge chip markets,” said Holly Vedova, director of the FTC’s Bureau of Competition in a statement. “This proposed deal would distort Arm’s incentives in chip markets and allow the combined firm to unfairly undermine Nvidia’s rivals.”To read this article in full, please click here
At its annual re:Invent conference, Amazon Web Services announced the newest generation of its Arm-based Graviton processors, the Graviton 3, which the company claims will be 25% or more faster than the last-generation chips in key workloads.The 25% is likely for integer workloads, because AWS also said the Graviton 3 boasts double the floating-point performances (FLOP), a three-fold performance improvement in machine-learning workloads, and better cryptographic performance. AWS also claims the new chips will use 60% less power.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The chips will power new EC2 C7g instances in the AWS cloud. The chips and instances will be the first to use DDR5 memory, which delivers 50% higher bandwidth than DDR4 but with a much lower power draw.To read this article in full, please click here
The dmesg command displays the content of the kernel's message buffer since the system's most recent boot. It displays a lot of details on how the system is working and problems it might be running into that you won't normally see. That can be a lot of data, but there are several tricks for paring it down.For example, Even though the system queried below has only been up a little more than three days, it's collected more than a thousand lines of data.$ dmesg | wc -l
1034
Linux security: Cmd provides visibility, control over user activity
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If you type only dmesg, you will see all available data. Sudo access is not required. You can also pipe the output of dmesg to the more and less commands to scan through it or simply pipe the output to grep, but the command itself provides a lot of options for selecting the most relevant information from the file.To read this article in full, please click here
There are a number of ways to add text to files on Linux systems without having to open an editor, such as the echo and printf commands. On the other hand, when you need to add A LOT of text, the technique you use can make the job tedious or a piece of cake.This post describes some of the commands you can use and the problems and benefits you can expect.Also see: How to loop forever in bash on LinuxThe echo commands append lines of text to existing files in a straightforward way:To read this article in full, please click here
The nexus of the ongoing competition among nations and corporations (such as Google and IBM) to demonstrate quantum primacy has shifted to a university in China where not one, but two experimental quantum computers reportedly have shown that quantum primacy is attainable.Quantum primacy is when a quantum computer is able to solve computational problems that are beyond the ability of traditional “classical” computers, yoked as they are to their quaint system of ones and zeroes.Researchers show quantum computers can reason
Don’t get me wrong; classical computers long have served with distinction. So did the abacus in its day. However, as society’s computational challenges became more complex--such as splitting a restaurant bill 11 ways among your cheap and quarrelsome family members--this ancient calculating device eventually gave way to the digital calculator.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the free command. It doesn't mean a command that you are not paying for, but one that tells you how much memory – physical and swap – is being used on your Linux system including how much is "free" and how much is available.
The Linux script command has been around for ages and provides a simple but useful service. It lets you record command line activity – both input and output. This can be very helpful in troubleshooting problems or verifying what was done later by reviewing the commands that were run along with their output.Even if you've used the script command time to time, it offers more options than many of us realize. In this post, we will look at the simplest use of script and some of the options that can make it even more useful.The easiest way to use the script command is simply to type "script" in the terminal window and press ^d when you want to stop the recording. The output, by default, will be saved in a file called "typescript". You will see the file name that is used in the first line of output.To read this article in full, please click here
Xilinx has introduced its latest data-center accelerator, the Alveo U55C, which it says is its most powerful accelerator yet thanks to a memory change.For the most part, the FPGA-powered Alveo U55C is similar to its predecessor, Alveo U280. But the U280 has 8GB of HBM2 memory and 16GB of DDR4 DRAM, while the U55C comes with 16GB of HBM2 memory, and no DDR4. HBM2 is considerably faster and more expensive than DDR4 memory.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
By going to all HBM2 and removing the DDR4, Xilinx is able to increase performance and considerably reduce power and size. The Alveo U55C card is a single-slot full height, half length (FHHL) form factor vs. the full height, full length, dual width form of the U280. It also has a much lower power draw, 150W vs. 215W.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the bpytop command. It's one of many "top" commands (like top and htop) that make it easy to gauge many aspects of system performance on Linux.
Most of us have dealt with hardware that stays in service well past its planned end-of-life date or that, for reasons of budget and bureaucracy, doesn’t even make it into service until well into its lifespan.Step one in planning and prioritizing server-hardware upgrades is inventorying and evaluating your existing hardware, which may seem like an appropriate job for an IT intern, it’s also a perfect job for PowerShell.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
Read system telemetry with PowerShell
The primary PowerShell cmdlet throughout this discussion is Get-WmiObject. Most server admins will have at least a passing familiarity with Windows Management Interface (WMI), a set of telemetry points to help monitor performance and server health, among other things. WMI is frequently used to filter the application of Group Policy Objects to only those computers that meet a specific set of criteria. WMI is Microsoft’s implementation of Common Information Model (CIM), which is an industry standard. The Get-WmiObject cmdlet is able to access both WMI and CIM classes.To read this article in full, please click here
Networking equipment was the news of the day at Nvidia’s GPU Technology Conference (GTC), with new hardware for improved end-to-end performance.Nvidia announced the Quantum-2 platform, a 400Gbps InfiniBand networking platform consisting of the Quantum-2 switch, ConnectX-7 network adapter, BlueField-3 data processing unit (DPU), and all the software to support the new architecture.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
At 400Gbps, NVIDIA Quantum-2 InfiniBand doubles the network speed and triples the number of network ports over the Quantum-1 product. With a three-fold performance increase in performance, data-center fabric switches can be reduced by six-fold, cutting data center power consumption and reducing the overall data center space by 7%, the company says.To read this article in full, please click here
The author of a new report from Forrester Research says that the simultaneous growth of IoT and edge computing usage are interlinked, and that future growth in both areas will be fueled heavily by federal regulations to reduce emissions.“We cannot disassociate the advancements in IoT without talking about the effect on edge,” he said. “They’re not distinct from each other..and the effect they have on use cases is combined.”[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
The demand for “sustainability-related service,” will place IoT and edge front and center, according to Forrester’s “Predictions 2022: Edge, IoT, And Networking” report. Environmental use cases like monitoring CO2 levels, pollution, and air quality will all be increasingly sought-after, as will IoT systems that allow businesses to manage their resources (think water and power usage) more efficiently.To read this article in full, please click here
The bpytop tool is similar to other performance monitoring tools available for Linux systems like top, iotop, htop, bashtop etc. It’s a terminal-based resource monitor that works efficiently and is visually appealing.The tool was ported from bashtop and rewritten in Python, so you need to have Python—version 3.6 or later—installed on your system to use it. (The “bpy” portion of the name undoubtedly stands for “bash Python”.)If you already have Python installed on your system, you can check the version using one of these sets of commands:Fedora Linux Mint
====== ==========
$ which python $ which python3
/usr/bin/python /usr/local/bin/python3
$ python -V $ python3 -V
Python 3.9.7 Python 3.8.10
Both systems shown are running Python3, but the Fedora system has /usr/bin/python set up as a symbolic link to python and the other system does not. So, they’re both using Python3.To read this article in full, please click here
Red Hat has rolled out version 8.5 of its main-line branch of Red Hat Enterprise Linux (RHEL), which upgrades its support for containerization, predictive analytics, and multicloud.Red Hat Insight, the company’s predictive-analytics service—available through most RHEL subscriptions—now has more robust abilities in the areas of vulnerability identification, compliance, and remediation, the company said.Containerization is upgraded with RHEL 8.5 to make containerized applications easier to deploy and manage, according to Red Hat. The company introduced the ability to create containerized images faster through rootless use of the OverlayFS filesystem. OverlayFS is “union file system,” which allows users to overlay one file system over another, enabling multiple users or applications to access it at the same time.To read this article in full, please click here
In this Linux tip, learn how to use the cheat command. It provides what have come to be called "cheat sheets" on a huge assortment of Linux commands. Once installed, all you have to do is type "cheat" followed by the name of the command for which you want to see sample commands.
AMD has emerged from its long defensive crouch to taking the fight directly to Intel and Nvidia, a bold move but one backed by a company that's been racking up wins lately.Coming on the heels of a record-setting quarter, AMD announced new EPYC server CPUs, a new line of Instinct brand GPUs it says are faster in than Nvidia’s best, the next generation of its CPU architecture, and a deal with Meta, formerly known as Facebook.[Get regularly scheduled insights by signing up for Network World newsletters.]
EPYC Milan-X CPU
AMD CEO Lisa Su introduced the EPYC Milan-X processors, an iteration of its third-generation server processors with a 3D-stacked L3 cache called 3D V-Cache. One problem with increasing cache is you get transistor sprawl and the die gets progressively bigger. 3D stacking reduces the physical size while increasing density.To read this article in full, please click here