Kevin's Weblog

I skipped the monday morning tutorials. There was nothing that looked really interesting, and I know from experience to pace myself. In the afternoon, I went to “Linux Performance Monitoring”. The talk was decent, but unfortunately it was considerably more basic than I had hoped, covering the basic tools that ship with the distros: vmstat, iostat, sar, and friends. I learned a couple little things, like using dstat to match interrupt counts to devices, but for the most part this is stuff I’ve already been using for years. I was hoping there was going to be some more advanced or newer stuff, like oprofile or systemtap, but there was nothing like that.

In the evening, I sort of crashed this Intel “press event”. It was supposed to be for bloggers (hey, look, I guess I’m one of those) and semi-invitation-only, but the invite URL was getting passed around. At any rate, they didn’t seem to upset about a few people who weren’t on the list. They fed us and gave us drinks, then had a presentation about processors and multi-cores and how thread programming sucks, as a lead-up to “The Big Announcement”, which is that they are open-sourcing Threading Building Blocks (and porting it to a number of OSes and architectures). I haven’t had time to look at it closely, but it seems like a pretty cool library for doing concurrent programming in C++. Sort of like an STL for concurrency. They gave everyone a copy of the book, so I guess I’ll learn a little more about how it works sometime soonish.