Posted on October 7, 2022

We will be upgrading the remaining systems including the physical hosts to the 6.0.0 kernel release. We’ve got it presently installed on about a dozen servers and so far only one expedited RCU CPU Stall and that occurred during boot-up on the physical server with the most guest machines. This can happen even with a good kernel because systemd’s parallelization results in large numbers of processes in run state simultaneously and this in turn can cause the RCU process not to get CPU in the 30ms allocated, but in the week we got only that one and no others where previous 6.0-rc5 and rc6 kernels generated 20-30 in the first five minutes and were basically unusable.

No single service should be out for more than about ten minutes EXCEPT for yacy which rebuilds it’s indexes every time it restarts and this process takes about half an hour.

The 6.0 kernel re-wrote the scheduler in a way that benefits multi-core systems. Although the changes were largely aimed at AMD’s Ryzen CPU’s, we say substantial improvements on our Intel based servers as well, particularly in the area of scheduling latency. It reduced the time it took our web server to load a WordPress page from about 280ms to 40ms, a seven fold improvement and the largest improvement I’ve seen from any Linux kernel upgrade since kernel .98.

This affects all Eskimo North services including shared web hosting, private virtual servers, shell servers, e-mail, and our free federated services friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and yacy.eskimo.com/. If you wish to support our free services, please consider signing up for a Linux shell or web hosting account at eskimo.com/services/free-trial…

I have often wondered why God forbids sexual immorality, and I have some thoughts on this.

In spiritual terms, In John 15:10 Jesus says, "If ye keep my commandments, ye shall abide in my love; even as I have kept my Father's commandments, and abide in his love."

I think this only approximates what is meant. It is clear from what descriptions of heaven exist that many things we take for granted in this universe, entropy in particular, do not exist. For if entropy existed in heaven so would decay and death and we know that it does not. And without entropy there is no need for energy as it would not dissipate, so we don't need to eat, and thus the lion can lie down with the lamb and the lamb can be confident it won't be eaten.

And without entropy there is no flow of time, and this makes sense as God is timeless.

I believe the the creation story of the Bible is misinterpreted in a major way, because it sets us apart from God, I believe we and all of creation are part of God, God thought, and that is why if he ceases to remember us, we cease to exist.

This is why everything in a physical sense reduces to fields, nothing material, because fundamentally it is all God thought.

So when Jesus says he abides in the Father's love and so we can abide in his, I really think it goes to our very existence, we are only drops in the ocean of God, and we will some day return to that ocean and this is where the relationship to sexual immorality comes into play. Because when we enter another's body, we are trying to recreate physically what is natural spiritually but in a physical sense it is very shallow and incomplete and thus profanes the spiritual joining that we will experience, and also that from which we came.

But that is just a spiritual aspect, there is a practical physical aspect as well, dealing with our evolution. And I'm not one that believes evolution and creation are at odds, I believe religion tells us what God did, science tells us how God did it, although science is an approximation at best. What we know about evolution is that men who are good providers, particularly during the times when resources were more scarce than in modern times, were preferred by women because they gave their off-spring a better chance to survive. Thus today, rich men are preferred over poor, have more mating opportunities, and that drives some to such extremes that they would sacrifice everyone else for their own proliferation.

This I think is the physical danger of sexual immorality, the Bill Gates, the Klaus Schwabs, the Rockeller's of the world, this is what drives their greed and destructiveness. And because this is not the world God wants for us, it is evil.

Posted on October 4, 2022

At this point I have Linux kernel 6.0 installed on all but private virtual machines and the physical hosts. So far it’s running MUCH better than rc5 or rc6, but not perfect. I’ve gotten ONE expedited RCU CPU stall in a days time on a dozen or so machines. With 6.0rc5-6 I would see dozens in the same time frame.

The scheduler has been substantially re-worked in the 6.0 kernel, most of these changes were aimed at AMD CPUs but it made for substantial performance improvements on Intel as well. One stall in one day across a dozen machines means one process hung for up to two minutes in that time frame, not a HUGE concern but enough that I don’t want to put it on the physical hosts yet. The scheduling changes cut the latency for the web server down by approximately 6 fold, that ain’t chicken feed!

I’ve posted the most recent expedited RCU CPU stall with the bug report I had filed with bugzilla.kernel.org, for anyone interested it is bug #216501 and you can read the details here: bugzilla.kernel.org/show_bug.c…

Modern Linux includes a module called evbug. If it is not blacklisted, then every USB event is logged to dmesg, and, if you have kernel configured to allow dmesg to be invoked with a non-privileged user, and you have a USB keyboard, there is a method for any user to gain access to your root account.

The fix for this is to blacklist evbug. In /etc/modprobe, create a file such as blacklist.conf, that contains:

blacklist evbug

And reboot. This should stop the evbug module from being loaded and thus your USB keyboard input from being printed to dmesg for potential public viewing.

Come out with a credit card that has a debt limit of zero, that is you can't actually charge anything to it, but it is in every other way valid.

This way when you have these sites with opt-out free trials, that is free trials that at the end you have to go in and opt out, often made so complicated as to be easier to cancel the card, rather than having the service just terminate if you don't opt-in at this point, you can use this card for the payment info, enjoy your trial, and then the billing will fail so you automatically opt-out on these opt-in bogus sites like youtube-tv.

Posted on October 2, 2022

Things are running smoothly but load is high with stock 5.15.0 kernel from Ubuntu. I’ve configured the latest 5.15 kernel (5.15.71) and installed on a number of machines and it is also running well with no forced preemption, 100HZ clock, and fully tickless kernel. This reduces overhead somewhat and so I am going to install on the physical servers tonight at 11PM which will require rebooting everything. This will result in some downtime between 11PM-11:30PM, not more than about 10 minutes for any given service.

I will be installing this kernel on most of the other machines during the week but I need to get it on the physical hosts tonight.

This will affect all Eskimo North services, including private virtual servers, shell servers, shared web hosting packages such as virtual domains, personal and business web hosting packages, and e-mail.

It will also affect our fediverse services friendica.eskimo.com/ (a fediverse social media site), hubzilla.eskimo.com/ (another fediverse social media site), nextcloud.eskimo.com/ (a federated cloud service), and yacy.eskimo.com/ (a federated non-censored search engine).

I just sent our illustrious President coup master a message, "Is your idea of building back better turning us all into radioactive dust?"

Suggest others let him know this course of action is NOT okay. Others being YOU!

Posted on September 30, 2022

From kernels 5.15 forward, we’ve had issues with expedited RCU CPU stalls on our servers.

I’ve experimented with kernels configured per the stock Ubuntu configuration and these same kernels do NOT show expedited RCU CPU stalls.

The RCU system is Read-Copy-Update, it is a means to allow read concurrency with updates without requiring a lock resulting in greater efficiency in modern multi-core CPUs or in multiple CPU systems. If you are interested in details read kernel.org/doc/html/latest/RCU…

The kernels I will be putting in place tonight are 5.19.12 and in a few cases 5.19.11 (I started the update working with 5.19.11 then kernel.org came out with 5.19.12), with a configuration closely resembling the Ubuntu “generic” kernels, which is to say it won’t be entirely tickless, only idle tickless and it won’t be entirely non-preemptive, but will allow voluntary preemption. This is less efficient than our normal kernels but a weeks worth of testing has shown it to be stable on four of our busiest servers.

I will be further testing a kernel that is voluntarily preemptive but completely tickless on the four busiest servers to see if that is stable. I’ve been testing this configuration on my workstation and other than higher latency you get with non-preemptive kernels, it has been stable. If this works out we will adopt this configuration on the rest of the servers next Friday.

This will affect all Eskimo services, shared web hosting, shell services, e-mail, virtual private servers, as well as our Fediverse services, friendica.eskimo.com/, hubzilla.eskimo.com/, nextcloud.eskimo.com/, and yacy.eskimo.com/.

The updates will begin at 11PM and should be completed by 11:30PM Pacific Daylight Time (GMT-0700) tonight Friday September 30th, 2022. No single service should be down for more than about ten minutes.