Hi! It is with sadness that I have to report the demise of coulomb, the system powered by an AMD Athlon XP with 1466 MHz, that has long been serving my GNU Hurd development needs. In the night from Tuesday to Wednesday, working on tracking down the <http://www.gnu.org/software/hurd/open_issues/cannot_create__dev_null__interrupted_system_call.html> issue, its venerable K7VTA3 2.0a mainboard, about as old as the current millennium, now appears to have bought the farm, and resists to be revived, having tried with three different ATX power supplies.
Of course, this system was long obsolete, but opposed to a solution based on a virtual machine, it had the advantage that it had a well-defined timing behavior, so I used it to track that we don't get whole-system performance regressions when performing certain tasks, such as building GCC, by just measuring wall time. As it was based on real hardware, it allowed for simply plugging in stuff, and see whether that works. Alas, this era now seems to be over, and I'll be moving the little development that I do into a virtual machine; Xen can measure whole-system domU CPU usage, I think -- not sure about KVM. Grüße, Thomas
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