Monthly Archives: January 2011

List of Sandy Bridge LGA1155 H67/P67 motherboards that support VT-d

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Since publishing my rant a few days ago, I’ve discovered a few more motherboards which CLAIM to support VT-d (Intel Virtualization Technology for Directed-IO). Of course you need a non-K flavour of Sandy Bridge CPU as well (ie i5-2400, i5-2500, i7-2600).

So here’s the list so far, which I’ll update as I find more:

  • Intel DP67BG (Confirmed, see comment by Michael)
  • ASRock P67 (All of them, last time I checked – i.e. Pro, Fatal1ty) (Seems to be bogus according to Brian)
  • ASRock H67M (And all variants)
  • Foxconn H67S and variants
  • Foxconn P67A
  • ASUS P8H67-V and P8P67? (See below)
  • BIOSTAR TP67XE and variants
  • BIOSTAR TH67XE and variants

There’s a good chance that if one of the H67/P67 boards from the same manufacturer (i.e. ASRock and Foxconn) have VT-d, all variants have it too. You can check by searching VT-d in the product manual.

Update 6/02/2011 – Latest Asus P8P67 manual (E6307) shows the VT-d option under “System Agent Configuration”. Is this a new addition or something I missed before I’m not sure. Quick check of other Asus boards ie P8P67 EVO or P8H67-M indicates they don’t have it. Exception is P8H67-V which seemed to have it from the beginning. It seems there’s hope for those with Asus boards.

Update 24/03/2011 – None of the boards except for the Intel one seems to support VT-d even if they claim to. There are continuing claims that P67/H67 doesn’t support VT-d.

Sandy Bridge Woes – LGA1155 P67/H67 and VT-d (I/O Virtualization)

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I recently upgraded my home server from an old Athlon X2 to the latest and finest from intel, namely the new Sandy bridge processors. These new processors come with a relatively new technology called VT-d or (Intel Virtualisation Technology with Directed I/O). It’s also called an IOMMU. This feature like the more common VT-x provides hardware support to improve virtualisation. VT-d does to PCI devices what VT-x does for the CPU, by virtualising and allowing remapping of the DMA. Basically, what it means is that you can now freely assign different PCI connected devices (like graphics card, USB host controllers) to your Virtual Machines. A use case would be to give a VM a real graphics card so it doesn’t have to rely on the slow virtualised graphics adapter.

It’s been a bit of a mystery whether VT-d is a CPU technology or a chipset/motherboard technology, but it’s clear that, like VT-x, you need both to know about this technology to work. Since the advent of i7s, various people have asking the support for this technology only to find that the main blocker is getting the right motherboard. Some lucky folks have gotten it as far back as dying days of the Core 2 era. Most i5s and i7s CPUs claim support for VT-d, however motherboards of P55 and H55 that support this was few and far between. The only sure way to find out if your motherboard supports it is if you find the option “Enable I/O Virtualisation” in the Advanced Features section of your BIOS. The situation markedly improved when P57 and H57 came about with MSI and Asus boards displaying the option. MSI’s H57M-ED65 is one such board. If you look at the downloadable manual, you’ll find the reference. Gigabyte is noticeably quiet on the matter. Armed with this knowledge I went out assuming that newer boards will follow the trend. How wrong was I.

There are special Sandy Bridge CPUs in the form of 250K and 260K. The K CPUs have a higher clock for the graphics, but sacrifices VT-d technology. Fortunately this is widely understood and reported, unlike last generation when confusion between VT, VT-x and VT-d reigned. What they failed to clarify was that, VT-d is unavailable in pretty much all P67/H67 chipsets. This means nobody can actually use VT-d anyway regardless of whether the CPU supports it or not. In fact, I don’t even know why Intel bother listing VT-d as a feature when support is so poor. Currently, the only sandy bridge (LGA1155) motherboard in existence, that supports VT-d is Intel’s DP67BG. I of course didn’t buy that board and as I’m building a server, I required integrated graphics and P67 doesn’t offer that. Only H67 does. As far as I can tell no H67 motherboard currently in existence has VT-d.

Anyway, this is my rant of the night.

Beginner to GIS and web mapping

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Recently, I’ve taken an interest in GIS and OpenStreetMap, this blog post serves as a quick guide and reminder to myself of what I’ve found.

OpenStreetMap or OSM, is the wikipedia equivalent for mapping. It already has quite extensive details of streets at least for Australia partially aided by the use of nearmap and yahoo. The only detail missing from it is street address numbers, which makes it less useful for searching addresses and routing. It does have a increasing number of POIs including restaurants, shopping centres and schools.

One of the first things you will find out is that longitude and latitude for a particular point on earth can differ depending on the Spatial Reference/datum you’re using. This blog post explains it perfectly. The most popular datum would probably be WGS84, which is the one used by GPSes. In Australia, many maps use GDA94, which is roughly equivalent to WGS84. The difference between WGS84 and GDA94 is that the continental plate of Australia moves north easterly around 7cm per year, and in GDA94 coordinates, all points in Australia will not change, whereas in WGS84 terms, every point in Australia will be offset due to the drift. In 2000, the difference between GDA94 and WGS84 is 45cm. By extrapolation, in 2010, it would be around 1 meter, which is still less than the error for standard consumer GPSes of 20 meters. For the most part, you can consider WGS84 and GDA94 the same.

There are many more spatial references defined and collected by various groups, the most popular being EPSG. You can find an extensive list of spatial references at spatialreference.org. Here are some notable references:

There seems to be two types of coordinate systems – projection and geographic. Geographic is the actual system with a datum used to describe location in the 3D world, where as projection is the system used to display the 3D world in 2D, converting a sphere or ellipsoid into a flat map. Three popular projections are Plate Carree, Mercator and UTM. Plate Carree simple maps lon/lat to X and Y, while Mercator progressively scales the map toward the poles, stretching Greenland north and Antarctica south, eventually placing the poles theoretically at infinity. You can find more projections at ESRI’s arcgis documentation.

Once you’ve learnt about what these geographic coordinate systems are, you might want to manipulate them. On the movable-type.co.uk website is sample code to convert between different spatial references or coordinate systems this code. Also on the same site is also code to calculate distance and bearing between two lon/lats points.

There are extensive open source tools available for GIS in the form of the OSGeo collection of tools.

Storage of map objects are available for postgresql (PostGIS) and sqlite (SpatiaLite), both adds OpenGIS standards to database.

The Javascript web map control used by OSM is OpenLayers, which supports multiple layer sources including google maps, yahoo and WMS. Another map display control is MapBuilder, but it seems it has reached its end of life, with the creators recommending OpenLayers. Both are open source.

That should mostly cover what I’ve learnt thus far.