Xen 3.3.0 was released today. Apparently at one point there was talk of calling it 4.0 due to the number of changes. I’m anxiously waiting to try it. It has power management, using real grub in paravirtualized domains (instead of pygrub), better performance for paravirtualized (PV) and hardware virtualized (hv) domains, and an updated version of qemu. I’m also hoping that the qcow2 driver is usable. Now the only question is which OS will have support for Xen 3.3 first.

• Xen 3.3.0 released!

If there’s one thing about hard drives I’ve learned in the last couple of years is that hard drives with a 1 year warranty are not worth buying. The likelihood of a drive failure before 3 years is fairly high in my experience. Right now I’m going through drives which have failed or are failing and checking their warranties to see if any can be replaced before I take them to freegeek for disposable. I figured it would be wise to make a list of links of warranty checkers.

I haven’t written about flash playing in a while but this Slashdot post about the state of Adobe Flash Player support on Linux reminded me to mention something. Swfdec is by far the most complete player for GNU/Linux. It also runs on 64-bit systems. That’s not to say it is without its problems, but it works well enough most of the time that I have no need to follow what Adobe does any longer. It looks like Debian has both Swfdec 0.6 and 0.7 branches available. I’m not sure if those have made it to Ubuntu 8.10 but it would be nice if they did. Of course I’m also willing to test the latest Gnash to see if it has overtaken Swfdec in compatibility or performance.

Speaking of rsync, I've noticed that it does not work reliably when syncing virtual disk images. In particular, when performing backups or migrations and an older version of a disk image exists I find that rsync does not correctly copy the changes. I have seen this several times now, each time verifying with an md5 and sha1 hash. I do notice that the syncs work correctly so long as the '-c' (checksums) option is used. Of course that option slows the process considerably. I'll be interested to test rsync 3 to see if this behavior is improved.