SHAOS » cube

Black big-endian and little-endian

Shaos — Fri, 21 Aug 2009 04:52:00 +0000

This is my home working place where I can port software from little-endian machine to big-endian:

Red table bought in IKEA. Right-bottom: Systemax server with Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 ГГц (Slackware 12.2). Right-top: PowerMac G4 Cube (colored to black) with Debian 5.0 and preloaded libfreevec. Left-bottom: subwoofer Logitech, power adapter for Cube and Gigabit switch. Left-top: UPS CyberPower 1500AVR. In the center under the table: KVM IOGEAR (switching USB keyboard+mouse and VGA between both machines). In the center on the table: display SAMSUNG SyncMaster 204B (20.5′ with ratio 4:3), Logitech audio speakers and microphone RadioShack. Also you can see black “Das Keyboard” that doesn’t have any characters on it

Vectorized memcpy on G4 Cube

Shaos — Tue, 03 Mar 2009 00:41:00 +0000

Again I tested new hardware using my memcpy benchmark – now for my 1st desktop on Intel Core 2 Duo 2.6 GHz and my 2nd desktop on PowerPC G4 450 MHz (black G4 Cube). Here you can see not-aligned (nal) and aligned (al) results and also “vectorized” results (G4-450v-nal and G4-450v-al) where memcpy was AltiVec optimized version from libfreevec v1.0.4.

P.S. If you want optimized AltiVec versions of such functions as bmove512, memccpy, memchr, memcmp, memcpy, memfrob, memmove, mempcpy, memrchr, memset, strcmp, strcpy, strlen, strncmp, strncpy, strnlen and swab for everything in your Linux system, then just put (of course after successful libfreevec installation) line /usr/local/lib/libfreevec_libc.so to file /etc/ld.so.preload (you can create this file if it’s not yet available) – thanks to Konstantinos Margaritis (author of libfreevec)!

My G4 Cube turns BLACK

Shaos — Sat, 28 Feb 2009 03:10:00 +0000

I decided to use G4 Cube as my second desktop computer. But my first desktop PC is black. So I bought black enamel spray for a reason to paint Cube to black color. The subject to turn black is internal metallic case:

Now I have stylish black colored G4 Cube with Debian GNU/Linux 5.0 “Lenny” on board

P.S. Lenny believes that X.org became smart enough to do all configuration by itself (xorg.conf is almost empty by default). In result I had 800×600 instead of 1280×1024, and to make correct resolution working I manually added parameters HorizSync and VertRefresh to section “Monitor” of xorg.conf…

Update: Black big-endian and little-endian

G4 Cube

Shaos — Sat, 07 Feb 2009 07:00:00 +0000

Finally I did it – I bought G4 Cube for myself! $250 (plus shipping) for PowerPC G4 450 MHz system is a little bit expensive, but it’s CUBE:

It even has “cracks” (as probably all G4 cubes

Of course I put Debian GNU/Linux on it and removed MacOS 9.2 that was preinstalled there.

One strange (for me) thing about G4 Cube is its power button that is not a button at all…

Now I can measure power usage of my electric devices, and as we can se Cube eats only 30 watts (actually it goes between 25 and 45 watts):

Probably I will use this G4 Cube in my home “grid” network for distributed computing…

Updated: Cube became black!