Guru dell'Eccelso Picco

After reading this interesting post on Phoronix about the great increase of performance between ubuntu 9.04 and 9.10, I finally convinced myself to make the upgrade.
My first concern was about the ATI driver, which gave me some trouble with 9.04.
Anyway after a good backup, I started the upgrade, and in almost 2 hours I was up and running with 9.10, with a lot of improvements!
The upgrade installed automagically the fglrx driver version 2:8.660, my previous version (built from source) was 2:8.620, however, after the first reboot I started in recovery mode to issue the magic command “aticonfig –acpi-services=off” because I feel that this is still crucial to make the driver work.
After this safety measure, I rebooted and really appreciated the boot speed! Upstart is making a great job really!
So far, I’m very impressed by this release, my major benefits are the following:

• Ultra fast boot and shutdown
• Great performance of the ATI driver. The black areas that sometimes were appearing for example scrolling a Firefox full screen window have disappeared
• Upgrading Skype to 2.1.0.81 solved the problem about the editing of my profile and avatar display
• Performance are really increased, for example opening PDF with Evince
• Not yet tested printing feature
• Suspend to ram works fine
• VMware Workstation works fine

((enjoy))

An interesting post from vmware.com performance blog about the scheduler of VMware ESX and the so called “Simultaneous scheduling”.

It’s an ineresting proof of the fact that adding more vCPU to a VM not always take you the expected benefit.

As an aside note, in this post there are interesting considerations about the scalability in term of performance of Web servers.

((enjoy))