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XAM Mandated Fields

In this post I look at what fields are mandated by the SNIA XAM v1.0 specification and write a small Java application to retrieve their default values using the XAM Reference VIM and EMC’s Centera XAM VIM. What is meant by a field in XAM? According to Section 3.1.5 of the XAM specification v1.0, Part 1, a field is a piece of uniquely identifiable data that can be attached to an XSet, an XSystem, or a XAM Library. More concretely, a field has a name, a number of attributes that describe how to interact with the object, and a value.

Atahualpa Theme

Welcome to the new home of my blog.  I have switched to WordPress 2.8 with the Atahualpha theme.  I hope you like the clean simple layout and lines of this theme which, BTW, is garnishing great reviews from the blogging community. I will probably leave the old blog in place at Blogger for a few months but will not be adding any new posts to it.

XAM Canonical Format

One of the key requirements for achieving long term data persistence is the ability to move data between archiving systems or, in the language of the SNIA XAM (eXtensible Access Method) specification, moving XSets between XSystems. The XAM v1.0 specification supports this requirement by providing support for exporting and importing Xsets.  It specifies the methods used to export an XSet from an XSystem, the resultant XSet canonical data interchange format (package) and the methods used to import an Xset into an Xsystem.  This post assumes that you are somewhat familiar with XAM and how to program to that specification using

Fedora 11 New Extended File Attributes Namespace

I am experimenting with XAM (eXtensible Access Method), which is a storage standard developed by SNIA (Storage Networking Industry Association and have developed a first prototype of a VIM (Vendor Interface Module) for the ext4 file system based on adding another namespace to the current extended file attributes support.  Since other Linux developers might be interested in how to add an extended attributes namespace to a file system, I decided to publish this post as a guide. Extended file attributes (EA) are extensions to the normal attributes which are associated with inodes in a file system.  They are simply name:value

Fedora 11 nVidia Twinview Support

Fedora 11 (Leonidas) ships with the nouveau nVidia graphics driver preloaded by default if a nVidia graphics card is detected at install time.  Previous versions of Fedora used the older X.Org nv driver. The nouveau project aims at producing Open Source 3D drivers for nVidia graphics cards.  According to the nouveau project Wiki 2D-support is in fairly good shape with EXA acceleration, Xv and Randr12 (think of dual-head, rotations, etc.). Randr12 should work for all cards up to, and including, Geforce 9000 series, although some issues with Geforce 8/9 laptops may still exist, for such issues bug reports should be