The Perfect Computer - 36 bits?
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From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 6 Apr 2007 10:44 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: > How did you ship the software if it had numbers "hardwired" in the > software? We had to be generic with all the specifics because > our customers also had multiple systems running software built > from the same distribution tapes. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#54 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? you had a (software) table of processor numbers for all known/supported processors at the time the product shipped ... with associated processor specific action/values. rather than doing a store cpuid and then a lot of code that did (inline) compares for a specific processor type ... and branch to code for that specific processor type ... there was a (software) table of each of the processor types ... do a store cpuid and then find the corresponding processor type in the table of processor types ... which then had details for what to do for processor specific handling. what i described about doing in the resource manager ... is being able to determine the needed processing by other characteristics ... w/o needing to match on processor specific cpuid. the dynamic adaptive code in the resource manager was supposed to dynamically adapt to things like workload and configuration. this allowed the resource manager to also dynamically adapt to processor types ... and in the case of the AT&T longlines example ... adapt to a decade of news processor (types) that were introduced for a decade after the specific code was given to longlines (not known at the time that specific code was generated) and in this post ... referring to PCM (plug compatible manufactor) clone processors http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#55 IBM to the PCM market(the sky is falling!!!the sky is falling!! the dynamic adaptive resource manager was also able to adapt to a variety of processor types/characteristics produced by other vendors. there was a joke associated with the original shipment of the resource manager. at the time, somewhat the state of the art (in most other operating system products) was to have a lot of processor specific code as well as a lot of (manual) "tuning" knobs ... that allowed installations to (manually) adapt the operation to the customer's workload and configuration. some number of corporate people reviewed the resource manager specifications and felt that it was extremely difficent that it didn't also have a whole bunch of manual tuning knobs ... and they wouldn't aggree/approve to shipping the product unless manual tuning knobs were added. so i added some manual tuning knobs ... documented what they did, included formulas and descriptions on how the tuning knobs were included in the dynamic adaptive calculations (along with shipping all the source code). so a couple decades later ... we are doing a customer call on large financial institution in the far east ... with respect to product that we were currently producing http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#hacmp and one of the younger IT people asked me if I was the same person that the resource manager was named after. He mentioned that it was studied in his computer classes at Univ. of Waterloo. I mentioned if they had studied the joke? In any case, the joke has to do with "degress of freedom" from dynamic adaptive, feedback, feed forward, etc control algorithms ... and how much degress of freedom the dynamic adaptive controls had vis-a-vis the manual tuning controls.
From: Charles Shannon Hendrix on 6 Apr 2007 12:26 ["Followup-To:" header set to alt.folklore.computers.] > Sigh! Even a moby IBM install from scratch didn't take six months. They were not telling you how long an install took, they were telling you how long it would take them to ramp up to support the laptop, which is reasonable. What happened is the idiot you talked to didn't know the difference between a custom request from you, and a stated timeline for adding a new OS to their support system. The same mistake happened over and over at Dell, and not just with Linux. Their sales droids read what is said about lead time for rolling out a new support system, and tell customers that's how long it would take to ship a unit. You have to marvel sometimes how some companies stay in business. -- shannon "AT" widomaker.com -- ["There are nowadays professors of philosophy, but not philosophers." ]
From: Rich Alderson on 6 Apr 2007 14:00 jmfbahciv(a)aol.com writes: > In article <m3lkh6eamk.fsf(a)garlic.com>, > Anne & Lynn Wheeler <lynn(a)garlic.com> wrote: >> 370 introduced store cpuid ... which included processor model number as ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^ >> well as processor serial number. [snip] >> one of the things that vm370 had was a table of processor cpuids and >> associated values. when i was doing with dynamic adaptive control >> algorithms and the resource manager product ... was to be able to have >> completely dynamic adaptive values ... w/o requiring a (software lookup) >> table of all possible cpuids (with corresponding values). > Do you and I have different defintion of processor ID? Each of our > processors had its own number assigned to it. (yea, yea, the KS was > different and that caused tonnes of trouble so I dismiss it). The short answer, which Lynn did not give you, is "Yes." What you/we call "processor ID" Lynn/IBM calls "serial number". What Lynn calls "processor cpuid" is presumably *only* the processor model number (which I underlined above), not the entire model-number+serial-number gestalt. -- Rich Alderson | /"\ ASCII ribbon | news(a)alderson.users.panix.com | \ / campaign against | "You get what anybody gets. You get a lifetime." | x HTML mail and | --Death, of the Endless | / \ postings |
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 6 Apr 2007 15:25 Rich Alderson <news(a)alderson.users.panix.com> writes: > The short answer, which Lynn did not give you, is "Yes." > > What you/we call "processor ID" Lynn/IBM calls "serial number". What Lynn > calls "processor cpuid" is presumably *only* the processor model number > (which I underlined above), not the entire model-number+serial-number gestalt. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#56 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? was about the resource manager being able to eliminate the explicit table of cpu/processor models that controlled certain kernel characteristics so the 370 store cpuid instruction ... the reference for the complete (current) instruction definition and all fields was provide in the previous post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#54 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? includes all the "stuff" ... model, serial, and some additional other stuff (like lpar information, if running in a virtual machine, etc) the model/processor type part would allow simplified code to perform various model specific/dependent operations. the serial number part would possibly aid in doing various software licensing. as mentioned previously ... software charging/licensing came into being with the 23jun69 unbundling announcement http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/subtopic.html#unbundle current genre sometimes refer to such stuff under the heading of DRM. old post http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#56 old lisa info with some old email mentioning that apple lisa shipped with serial number feature ... that could be used for implementing various stuff in support of DRM-like operation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007b.html#email830213 for a lot of of topic drift ... there was a serial number feature announced for intel processors in the 90s ... that got thoroughly trounced on the grounds that it might be used for privacy invasive operations. the current feature that sometimes is referred to as possibly also being leveraged for privacy invasive operations is the TPM/TCP/etc stuff for trusted computing this thread/posts http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn1 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn2 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn3 http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm5.htm#asrn4 got started when I mentioned that I was giving a security/assurance talk in the trusted computing track at an Intel Developers Conference. also reference here http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/index.html#presentation this set of posts makes reference to a whole series of patents ... some of them related to high assurance chip/device operation http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#48 Governance of anonymous financial services http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/aadsm26.htm#49 Governance of anonymous financial services
From: Anne & Lynn Wheeler on 6 Apr 2007 20:02
Del Cecchi <cecchinospam(a)us.ibm.com> writes: > But they were considered separate sites, like POK and EF or POK and > Kingston, at least in the part of IBM I was familiar with. re: http://www.garlic.com/~lynn/2007g.html#47 The Perfect Computer - 36 bits? how, 'bout pok plant site and myers corner ... or former myers corner .... just doing search engine, turns up http://www.hvedc.com/siteadmin/upload/167-155MyersCornersRoad.pdf somewhat fading memory ... but i think sindelfingen and boeblingen were closer than myers corners and pok plant site ... or closer than the (former) san jose plant site and the (former) santa teresa lab (now silicon valley lab). for total topic drift, i was on a trip in DC the week before they had the opening ceremony for santa teresa lab. It had been originally going to be called the Coyote lab (taking the name from the closest post office) ... however, the week before, there was this demonstration on the steps of the capital (i may have seen it, but was in no way part of it) by the "Coyote" organization. They managed to quickly change the name to santa teresa lab before the opening ceremony (after the closest main road). |