R3Ware, Inc. / Robert R. Randall

For those of you out there looking for a RAID stack for embedded applications there appears to be clear momentum behind using the Linux MD RAID stack with hardware acceleration. Both AMCC and Intel have I/O processors that support enhance the MD RAID stack with hardware assisted speed improvements using XOR engines and extra DMA engines. Very lovely stuff if you’re looking for an I/O chip for a RAID application. Linux has support for all of the major interconnects (Ethernet, FCP, Infiniband) with driver support for the popular chips (see SCST project). Building a RAID controller with one of these options appears more like an integration task than a build it yourself task. At least from the vantage point of this software and firmware author.This is a wake up call to all of the old style RAID vendors that still believe their RAID stacks are the crown jewels of the product line. RAID as a feature is a commodity item but isn’t really priced like one at the moment. If we start to see real product in the space that is taking advantage of these building blocks expect some price pressure on the legacy RAID vendors. Storage goodness just keeps getting cheaper and cheaper and that needs to continue for some time to come.

I’m doing some work again with Intel XScale IOP (ARM) processors.  I have to give a shout out to Macraigor for updating their support tools to integrate with Eclipse.  The combination of the two make for a very useful integrated IDE for firmware development work.  Being able to step through RedBoot code in the IDE’s debugger has reduced cycle times immensely.  Thanks Macraigor and the Eclipse teams.  And thanks for making it all available on current Linux distributions.  I’m not a fan of the Windows/Cygwin/etc/etc environment; too difficult to share.  Now I can setup a single Linux server with several JTAGs attached and everyone can use the same toolset while only one of us has to handle the hassle of getting it all installed, configured, and working.  Less setup time + well integrated tools =  more productivity and less wasted time.  And that’s a good thing…

My 2007 vintage MacBook Pro was starting to feel a bit sluggish.  Running several virtual machines under Fusion and doing work at the same time caused just too much stress on the disk i/o and 4GB of RAM.  So I went and did some research and did some upgrades.  I now have a 128GB SSD with the 2nd generation Samsung controller in it and it is amazingly fast.  I also discovered that I could upgrade the machine to 6GB of RAM.  It took some searching to find the right part but it was well worth the effort.  The machine is almost never disk i/o bound, even when swapping, and the extra memory makes a BIG difference when running VMs.  Much happiness for this old geek.  I also plunged into Snow Leopard which also helps since it does conserve some memory and disk space.  Long live my MacBook – it has to, it was not cheap