Let’s say you’re a big company in a competitive industry.  One who innovates and succeeds by creating software.  Not extending COTS, not adapting existing code.  Generating fresh, new code, at your full expense.  The value the company receives by investing in the creation of that software is competitive advantage, sometimes known as the profit-motive.

You’re an executive at this company.  Creating the software was your idea.  You are responsible for the ROI calculations that got the whole thing off the ground.

Your career may rest on the advantage the invention provides, and you are boldly considering opening up the code you’ve created.  But first you need to understand why so many of your peers (at company after company) have staked their careers behind open-sourcing what was once their company’s secret sauce.

Let’s look at some examples.  
Continue reading “The Open-Source Advantage…through the eyes of Red Hat, DreamWorks and OpenStack” →

Customers often want the lowest possible latency for their application.  Whether it’s VOIP, weather modeling, financial trading etc.  For a while now, CPUs have had the ability to transition frequencies (P-states) based on load.  This is the called a CPU governor, and the user interface is the cpuspeed service.

For slightly less time, CPUs have been able to scale certain sections of themselves on or off…voltages up or down, to save power.  This capability is known as C-states.  The downside to the power savings that C-states provide is a decrease in performance, as well as non-deterministic performance outside of the application or operating system control.

Continue reading “processor.max_cstate, intel_idle.max_cstate and /dev/cpu_dma_latency” →