Blog – Steve Scargall

How To Emulate CXL Devices using KVM and QEMU

What is CXL? Compute Express Link (CXL) is an open standard for high-speed central processing unit-to-device and CPU-to-memory connections, designed for high-performance data center computers. CXL is built on the PCI Express physical and electrical interface with protocols in three...

How To Build a custom Linux Kernel to test Data Access Monitor (DAMON)

DAMON is a data access monitoring framework subsystem for the Linux kernel. DAMON (Data Access MONitor) tool monitors memory access patterns specific to user-space processes introduced in Linux kernel 5.15 LTS, such as operation schemes, physical memory monitoring, and proactive...

Resolving commands ‘Killed’ on GCP f1-micro Compute Engine instances

When I want to perform a quick task, I generally spin up a Google GCP Compute Engine instance as they’re cheap. However, they have limited resources, particularly memory. When refreshing the package repositories, it’s quite easy to encounter an Out-of-Memory...

How To Linux Performance

How To Monitor Persistent Memory Performance on Linux using PCM, Prometheus, and Grafana

In a previous article, I showed How To Install Prometheus and Grafana on Fedora Server. This article demonstrates how to use the open-source Process Counter Monitor (PCM) utility to collect DRAM and Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory statistics, and visualize the...

How To Linux Performance Troubleshooting

Using ltrace to see what ipmctl and ndctl are doing

Occasionally, it is necessary to debug commands that are slow. Or you may simply be interested in learning how the tools work. While there are many strategies, here are some simple methods that show code flow and timing information. To...

How To Install and Boot Microsoft Hyper-V 2019 from Persistent Memory (or not)

In a previous post I described how to install and boot Fedora Linux using only Persistent Memory, no SSDs are required. For this follow on post, I attempted to install Microsoft Windows Server 2022 onto the persistent memory. TL;DR – I was...

How To Install and Boot Microsoft Windows Server 2022 from Persistent Memory (or not)

In a previous post I described how to install and boot Fedora Linux using only Persistent Memory, no SSDs are required. For this follow on post, I attempted to install Microsoft Windows Server 2022 onto the persistent memory. TL;DR – I was...

How To Install and Boot Microsoft Windows Server 2019 from Persistent Memory

In a previous post I described how to install and boot Fedora Linux using only Persistent Memory, no SSDs are required. For this follow on post, I attempted to install Microsoft Windows Server 2019 and 2022 onto the persistent memory. TL;DR –...

How To Install and Boot VMWare VSphere/ESXi from Persistent Memory (or not)

In a previous post I described how to install and boot Linux using only Persistent Memory, no SSDs are required. For this follow on post, I attempted to install VMWare VSphere/ESXi v7.0u2 onto the persistent memory. TL;DR – It doesn’t...

How to Boot Linux from Intel® Optane™ Persistent Memory

Introduction In this article, I will demonstrate how to configure a system with Intel Optane Persistent Memory (PMem) and use part of the PMem as a boot device. This little known feature can reduce boot times for those that need...

June 7, 2021