Loreena McKennitt to perform at Concerto di Natale 2008 (Christmas Concert 2008)

As stated in the performances page in Loreena McKennitt's official website, Loreena is going to perform at the Concerto di Natale 2008 (Christmas Concert 2008) on December 7th at the Philharmonic Theatre in Verona, Italy.

After 13 editions held at the Aula Paolo VI, Vatican City, this year the Concerto di Natale comes back to Verona's Philharmonic Theater. Verona is an elegant and beautiful city of Veneto, bordering Lombardia and at a privileged position at the end of the Colli Berici hills chain, at few kilometers from Garda Lake, Italian largest lake. I strongly recommend a visit to this charming city, dining in a restaurant near the medieval center and strolling around, admiring the beauty of the soft hills and the river surrounding the town. And for all the Romeos accompanied by their girlfriend, if that night you feel the romance, you can pay a visit to Giulietta's house.

Besides Loreena, many other bigs are going to perform in a concert which is already a tradition in Italy. The concert will be broadcast on the Italian national television (RAI) on December 24th at 21.00 and will also be broadcast via satellite by RAI International. The concert program, as stated at the official site, is the following (starting at 19.00):

• Zach Ashton (USA)
• Angelique Kidjo (Benin)
• Sananda Maitreya (USA)
• Loreena McKennitt (Canada)
• Dionne Warwick (USA)
• Paolo Fresu (Italy)
• Irene Grandi (Italy)
• Enzo Jannacci (Italy)
• Andrea Mingardi (Italy)
• Lola Ponce (Argentina) e Giò di Tonno (Italy)
• Neri Per Caso (Italy)
• Piero Mazzocchetti (Italy)
• PFM - Premiata Forneria Marconi (Italy)
• Katia Ricciarelli (Italy)
• Alabama Gospel Choir (U.S.A)
• Coro di Voci Bianche "A.d'A.MUS" of Verona directed by Maestro Marco Tonini

I already bought my tickets and will fly there on December, 5th, to enjoy a couple of days in Veneto before attending this event. I don't know if the concert is already sold out but if I could assist, I wouldn't miss such an opportunity to see Loreena perform, together with a bunch of another great artists, in a concert whose raised funds will be donated to the Don Bosco Foundation, to improve the lifes of Haitian children living in poverty.

Enjoy!

Solaris 10 update 6 bug: x86: ata timeout during boot (6586621)

This really weird bug is blocking me from updating Solaris 10 on every Sun Ultra 24 development workstation we have. Installation is performed normally and the first time I hit this bug was during a test deployment of Solaris 10 update 5 05/08. During boot, the machine seems to hang and a message similar to this is displayed:

scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: reset bus, target=0 lun=0
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: early timeout, target=0 lun=0
gda: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0 (Disk0):
Error for command 'read sector' Error Level: Informational
gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Sense Key: aborted command
gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Vendor 'Gen-ATA ' error code: 0x3
gda: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0 (Disk0):
Error for command 'read sector' Error Level: Informational
gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Sense Key: aborted command
gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Vendor 'Gen-ATA ' error code: 0x3
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: abort request, target=0 lun=0
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: abort device, target=0 lun=0
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: reset target, target=0 lun=0
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: reset bus, target=0 lun=0
scsi: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0 (ata0):
timeout: early timeout, target=0 lun=0
gda: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0 (Disk0):
Error for command 'read sector' Error Level: Informational
gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Sense Key: aborted command
gda: [ID 107833 kern.notice] Vendor 'Gen-ATA ' error code: 0x3
gda: [ID 107833 kern.warning] WARNING: /pci@0,0/pci-ide@1f,2/ide@0/cmdk@0,0 (Disk0):

As documented in Solaris 10 Update 6 release notes, this bug has these 5 known workarounds (full details for each workaround can be found in the release notes):

• Workaround 1: Enable AHCI in BIOS if available on the system. Enabling this setting requires a reinstall of the Solaris OS.
• Workaround 2: Install Solaris on a disk on a controller which does not use the ata driver.
• Workaround 3: Disable MP in the BIOS setup so that a single processor is active.
• Workaround 4: Disable MP in Solaris so that a single processor is active. Perform the following steps from the Grand Unified Bootloader (GRUB) menu.
• Workaround 5: Disable microcode update.

Workaround 3 and 4 have such an impact that are not realistic. Workaround 1, when possible, implies a new Solaris 10 installation, which in my case wouldn't be such a nuisance but in most cases isn't viable, too. Workaround 5, as documented in the release notes, relies on running a script after boot, which is a deployment detail I don't really like.

Sun is trying to be competitive on the desktop market and is struggling to push Solaris on x86, too. The Sun Ultra series (20, 24, 40) is a wonderful line of machines but... Ultra 24 is affected by this bug! Hopefully, Sun Ultra 20 M2 is not and I think I'll keep on buying Sun Ultra 20 instead of Sun Ultra 24: moreover, they have 2 NICs by default and I often need multihomed workstations.

I think I'll wait for the next Solaris 10 release to (hope to) see it fixed.

Sun Solaris 10 update 6 (10/08) has been released

Sun just updated its Solaris 10 operating system and began to ship Update 6 this week. There were no big changes since last release, probably the most notable being a bunch of ZFS improvement such as:

• support for ZFS root filesystems during setup, which is something which makes me think about upgrading a couple of server! ;)
• ZFS rollback without unmount
• zfs send supports incremental backup from snapshot
• gzip compression support for ZFS file systems
• double parity RAID-Z support

A descriptive list of improvements can be found here and the complete What's new document from the documentation center can be consulted here.

Please consult the list of known bugs before deploying this version of Solaris 10, as usual. The only thing that blocks me from deploying Solaris 10 on my development workstation since version 05/08 is bug 6586621 which hasn't been fixed yet.

Sun xVM VirtualBox 2.0.4 has been released

In less than two months Sun xVM VirtualBox version 2.x has undergone the third minor revision and VirtualBox 2.0.4 has been released.

As a long time VirtualBox user, I'm pleased to see this product evolve. I'm running Debian 4.0 testing, Ubuntu 8.10, Windows Server 2003 and Windows XP on a Solaris Nevada (b101 actually) guest on an HVM capable machines and it's a long time I'm not experiencing any problem during my daily life with VirtualBox. And now that version 2.x introduced support for 64 bits kernels, I think I'm not going to install a brand new image in a very long time: I have a backup of a snapshot of the Virtual Machines in a ZFS snapshot and whenever I rollback or clone an image, it's a no-brainer 5 minutes work.

The product covers almost 100% of my needs: the only thing I would really like to see in VirtualBox is audio input support for Solaris guests.

Looking forward to see Sun xVM server released: http://xvmserver.org/.

Congratulations, Lewis Hamilton

Well well well, if someone told me a long time ferrarist as I am would be saying this as soon as we lost the World Championship at the last bend, I wouldn't believe it. But after seeing the last race of this suffered season, in which one year more the title has been assigned only at the last race, I want to congratulate with Lewis Hamilton. I just think a great pilot has demonstrated who he is and Formula One has a new talent to entertain us in the years to come.

I only hope seeing Lewis wearing a red suit very soon.