Alternatively, if you use services from a hosting company that uses CentOS images in a cloud : drop me a line and let me know about them, I will try and reach out directly.

Thanks in advance and look forward to getting in touch with some of you guys.

- KB

The first thing that I've started now doing, when asked a strange question is ask the person 'What are you really trying to achieve?'. You might be amazed how many times the answer has nothing to do with the question being asked. Try to establish what the end goal is, and in many cases its clear that the person has been lead astray by random posts on the internet, some of which are perfectly fine in their own context, but can be quite a kludge outside that context.

Establishing, clearly what the goal is before advice or opinion is thrown at people will always result in a better overall experience. And to the people spending their time in the irc channels, web forums and mailing lists helping others out : must respect. You guys are the ones making the idea of Communities and Open Source work.

- KB

- KB

Might be worth noting that while its getting most of its attention based on the ARM buzzword, they seem to be saying that Intel as well as AMD cpus might make it into these machines as well. So while OS options might be somewhat limited at the moment, that problem should solve itself fairly easily.

On the other hand, getting 128 cores into a 2U AMD machine these days isnt that hard - its a slightly different set of mechanics to this cluster-in-a-box solution, but in many cases solves similar problems - and you get the advantage of a single hyper visor, should one need it. Then there are also near-commodity like specialist kit which goto 512 Cores in a 2U machine ( x86 example: http://www.qsscit.com/en/01_product/02_detail.php?mid=27&sid=95&id=135&qs=56 )

Its striking as to how much of a difference having this extra performance in the laptop would make. In march I upgraded the memory on this laptop from 2GB to 8GB - which also made a massive difference, specially since I almost never reboot the device and the filesystem cache get very good at handling just the right kind of stuff - but what kills them is my email ( ~ 30 gb ) and VMs ( upto 5 running at any given time ). Having the SSD now means that I no longer need to drop back to 10 seconds for jedit startup after I've been running a couple of VMs.

One thing that hasn't gone quite to expectation is the battery life. The HP 2540p had ~ 4 hrs or so, doing what I do, when I got it new. That had dropped to just over 3 hrs with the 250gb sata disk in. With the SSD its now gone to 2 hrs ~30 min or so. Initially that felt quite strange, I was expecting it to go in the other direction. And while I havent been able to put a finger on exactly what this is, it seems like there are 2 interesting side effects from the SSD upgrade.

1) The four cores on this i5 laptop now run at full speed ( 2.53 Ghz ) a lot more often than they did in the past, trending this over the last 48 hrs and its averaged 1.87Ghz; Not sure what it was earlier but the cpu governors used to stay blue a lot more than they do now.

2) Heat. The cooling fan is on a lot more, and the heat vent seems a lot warmer than it ever did in the past. This might be due to the cpus running a lot faster, a lot more. The disk itself does not 'seem' to be any warmer. The bottom left side of the laptop which houses the disk feels cool.

The big win of-course, is performance of everything. Almost every app just starts in place ( even eclipse! ). Doing a search in large code projects is instantaneous. Git operations are visibly quicker. Even using svn isn't nearly as boring as it used to be, if I can stop adding -a to all my svn commits it would not get in my way.

The only thing that isn't quite as quick as it needs to be on this machine now is the graphics interface ( intel HD ).

Also worth keeping in mind is that use CentOS-6 for the SSD hosted content, and make sure you have 'discard' enabled as a mount option.

- KB

Most people will want to know how this impacts CentOS and the CentOS-6 plans. We are, at this time, on course to deliver CentOS-6 within the next couple of weeks. We will carry on with those plans as is, and deliver a 6.0 release and then goto work on 6.1. I am fairly confident that we can get to a 6.1 release within a few weeks of the 6.0 set being finalised. Partially due to the automation and the testing process's being put into place to handle the entire CentOS-6 branch.

If you would like to follow progress of the QA and Release team, you are welcome to drop in at http://qaweb.dev.centos.org/qa/ . Jeff has been keeping the calendar as updated as possible and is doing a good job of keeping a fair bit of information flowing through there. At some point next week, we will try and get some dates in place for the 6.1 process as well.

So what happens if 5.7 comes along in the mean time ? Well, the CentOS-5 process is now completely disconnected from the CentOS-6 one, and a 5.7 release should have no impact on the progress of CentOS-6 and the release cycles. We have also been working on plans for an opt-in, by design process that would allow users to get early access to packages being built for a point release. More details on that soon.

Comments and feedback are always welcome!

- KB