I noticed that I had an field in top labeled "st" and that it was busy once I switched some Xen domains to be file backed (tap:aio) instead of LVM backed (phy). Anyway, after doing some investigation I found that "st" means "steal_time" and is "the cpu time spent in involuntary wait." This is time spent executing other virtual domains in Xen or other virtualization applications. I couldn't find the details when searching for information about the top command (top being one of those difficult search terms). But since top gets its values from /proc/stat I was able to use that to aid my research. I ended up finding the details at http://www.linuxhowtos.org/System/procstat.htm and http://kerneltrap.org/node/8235.

Sure there are a lot of updates and other niceness but today I got excited about some new packages that haven’t been present in past releases. I’ve included them with others that I’ve mentioned in the past. So here are packages that are new in Ubuntu 8.10 but that I plan to use immediately.