Peter's blog

The Grip flavor of Emdebian project allows to create thinner Debian root file systems. I've created one that includes apt, vim-tiny, net-tools, iputils-ping, and isc-dhcp-client. Later I've added grub and Kernel 2.6.32-5-686. The total size of this Emdebian is about 66MB, which is 3.5 times smaller than the usual 230 MB required for regular Debian root file system. Want to test it? I've created a 128MB bootable image file for x86 architecture. You will need at least 48MB of RAM to this image work. You can download it here . For testing use USB pen drive and a personal computer that allows booting from USB. The procedure: 1 - After downloading, uncompress using gzip: # gzip -d peters-emdebian.img.gz 2 - Copy the image do destination pen drive using dd. Be careful to use correct destination as dd will overwrite it. Replace "X" with the correct drive letter. All data on destination storage will be lost. # dd if=peters-emdebian.img of=/dev/sdX bs=8k 3 - Boot!

Virtualization is being sold as a solution for data center hardware idleness. Increasing the hardware usage level from less than 20% to more than 70% is possible with virtualization solutions. This may represent advantages like more available computing power and less servers consuming electricity, space and services. But at what cost? What is the price of virtualization solutions in terms of computing power and I/O consumption? What is the overhead of the virtualization layer?  Sample graph showing read performance for Linux Read more