
Zing - A JVM for virtualized x86 platforms with pauseless GC - cgbystrom
http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/
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wccrawford
I really, really hate sales sites that don't list prices.

I also think their use cases are either a joke or written by a fool. "Scary
for Apps"? Seriously? <http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/use-cases>
Also makes a lot of bold statements that it doesn't even try to back up with
numbers like "Better application performance under hypervisors than if run
natively".

My scam sense tells me to run for the hills just from that one page. I hope
for their sake that they redo that page in a hurry.

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Nrsolis
You probably don't buy much equipment.

Keep this in mind: most companies that sell to enterprise and service provider
customers aren't looking to make money with their website. Their SALESPEOPLE
are there to properly qualify the leads and demonstrate the value of the
product.

The whole point of not listing prices is to get customers to self-qualify.
Those that genuinely find value in the products as presented will make the
effort to contact the company. Price is really only something that is
mentioned towards the end of the sale and indicates that there is considerable
room for discounting from list price.

THAT's how it's done.

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KC8ZKF
That's the path Sun Microsystems took in the earlier part of this century. The
problem was, it was much easier to head over to Dell and buy a box and slap
Linux on it. Ten minutes of your time, and you didn't have to try to convince
a salesperson you were worthy of buying something.

~~~
Nrsolis
You're not honestly comparing Sun hardware with Dell, right? You really think
that Dell+Linux was competition for Sun?

Sun was selling to a particular customer that demanded rock solid stability.

If Linux had never happened, Dell servers wouldn't have made a dent in Sun's
marketshare. Don't count out Windows either. They both ate away at the BOTTOM
of the market for a while.

But neither of those have anything to do with a sales model.

If your hardware lists for $1M+ per box, you don't sell that with a webpage.
You sell it after many many visits with the customerto be sure that this is
really what they need and that they will be able to use it.

Go look for a price for the CRS-1/8 on Cisco's webpage and tell me if you see
it. Same for Juniper.

The appearance of a price on a webpage is a clear indication that you will
never speak to anyone at that company who understands your business or
requirements.....EVER.

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KC8ZKF
All I'm saying is that, even in 2001, it was difficult for a person to by just
one or two Sun boxes. Sun didn't care about your business. They had
salespeople to _ahem_ qualify you. A hacker needing to get one or two unix
boxes up and running was much more likely to buy an Intel-based machine and
put Linux on it than buy a low-end Sparc from Sun. As a result, they lost
mindshare.

~~~
Nrsolis
So they didn't care about your business, right? That just means you're not
their target customer, right? They didn't seem to lose mindshare with the
customers that they were serving now did they?

I'm not Boeing's target market. It doesn't surprise me that they aren't going
out of their way to post prices of 777 engines for my perusal.

In the end, you got the product you wanted (cheap Dell) and a business got a
customer they wanted (dude with small budget).

~~~
shpxnvz
_They didn't seem to lose mindshare with the customers that they were serving
now did they?_

Sure they did. I have personal experience with a company that dumped
Sun/Solaris to move to Linux servers in the last 5 or 6 years.

~~~
Nrsolis
I have personal experience with a company that moved off of Linux because they
couldn't get decent enough hardware to handle their load. We could trade
examples all day long.

The OP made a comment about web pages with pricing. My point was that lots of
companies target customers that are not THEM. In fact, they often choose a
strategy that allows them to explicitly target those customers that they think
are their most likely prospects. Sometimes they get it right; sometimes they
don't. Like a lot of things that drive company success, picking the right way
to reach customers is an important decision.

Don't forget that Sun was purchased by Oracle for a princely sum. A lot of
those Sun customers didn't seem to feel that their dollars were wasted.

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bpuvanathasan
Azul is a great innovator in the JVM space, and I think their innovation will
start to trickle down to other VM based languages like Ruby, Python, PHP,
JavaScript etc. They've already open sourced some of their innovations:
<http://www.managedruntime.org>

~~~
nwmcsween
Not so much in vms and more in beating current operating systems into actually
working for the applications. I think a few other language vms had the same
issue but instead of trying to beat Linux into usability they used bare
hardware via qemu.

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po
I'm actually more interested in the "elastic memory" bit:
<http://www.azulsystems.com/products/zing/elastic-memory>

When I used to work with JVM's all day I was always frustrated about having to
decide how big a maximum heap for a given app would be. We had some xml
processing tasks that almost never used much memory but every now and then
would need tons. It was one part I couldn't thin-provision.

Am I right in interpreting this as shipping the JVM work off to a dedicated
appliance-like server? Does that mean the memory profile on the appliance is
the one that can be thin-provisioned?

Heap size tuning is one of those things that made me hate the JVM.

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jaen
Previous discussion about the (awesome) GC:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2022723>

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jburwell
This technology could be extremely interesting -- especially if they make it
easy to provision on EC2. Getting rid of the overhead to customize OS
distributions simply to run a JVM would reduce TCO and time to market not to
mention better resource utilization.

~~~
spullara
If anyone sees an AMI that boots on EC2 built from the sources at
<http://www.managedruntime.org/> please send it my way.

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nitrogen
Simply regarding the pauseless GC aspect, what is preventing someone from
adding an existing realtime garbage collector like
Rollendurchmesserzeitsammler (hereinafter rdmzs) to OpenJDK? Obviously rdmzs
is designed for audio processing, as it bases its heap size on the audio
processing cycle time, but are these similar GC concepts, or is the "pauseless
GC" mentioned here something completely different from what rdmzs does?

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jasonwatkinspdx
I'm not familiar with the internals of rdmzs, but there's a fair bit of actual
technical information available about the Azul collector. It makes heavy use
of manipulating virtual address mappings, and by this gains the property of
being relatively insensitive to heap size.

My impression is that it's a copying collector that works on pages at a time.
When a page is relocated, it's marked protected in the memory address
mappings, allowing the runtime to trap and fix any stale pointers at the
moment they are used. At the same time, the collector proper uses memory
fences to keep track of what pointers have been fixed, eventually allowing the
protected pages to be released from the memory map.

I don't know GC literature very well, but AFAIK this design is novell. The
original implementation made heavy use of high performance memory primitives
supplied by the Azul hardware. I gather they now have found a way of running
with acceptable performance on commodity x86 processors under the
virtualization.

~~~
pmjordan
This sounds brilliant, virtual memory is a hardware feature which is currently
sorely underused in user space. Unfortunately, most mainstream kernels don't
give you deep enough access to the VM subsystem for serious trickery. For
example, you can't map the same memory at multiple addresses unless it's file-
backed; there's just no API for it. I have to admit I don't know if this would
cause problems with caches on certain hardware.

In any case, you're free to mess with (virtualised) page tables when the
parent is a hypervisor.

~~~
jasonwatkinspdx
I agree.

While I'm not a systems programmer, from what I've read (particularly from
Poul-Henning Kamp) I think enriching the virtual memory abstraction is going
to be a key area for OS innovation shortly. MMU's and the signaling mechanisms
offer a unique ability to trap events happening dynamically within your
program. I think by revising the userland/kernel API, I think there's likely
many interesting ways for userland software to better utilize the MMU's in
modern processors.

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codexon
I wonder when a real time GC will be available for openjdk.

