I was reading the Graphcore documentation and came across the V-IPU software. The documentation says I can download it from the Graphcore software download portal, however I don't see it anywhere among the downloadable software (link below):
https://downloads.graphcore.ai/
I checked whether the Poplar SDK contains it but it doesn't, and it's not already installed on the machine I'm using (DSS8440 IPU SERVER). On the other hand, I'm able to run PopTorch without it, so I'm guessing V-IPU doesn't exist anymore? If not, where can I find it?
Graphcore's Virtual-IPU (V-IPU) is a software layer for allocating and configuring Graphcore IPUs in IPU-Machine and IPU-POD (a collection of interconnected IPU-Machines) systems, as described e.g. in the Introduction section of the V-IPU user guide. As you are using a Dell DSS 8440 IPU server and not an IPU-M or an IPU-POD system, V-IPU is not needed to run your programs on the IPU, as you have already verified yourself, and it is not visible to you on the Downloads portal either. You only need Poplar SDK to get going on the DSS 8440 server.
I'll add a few more details about these different systems, to clarify why V-IPU software is not needed with the IPU server you're currently using. The Dell DSS 8440 IPU server features eight Graphcore dual-IPU C2 cards, which are connected via a high speed PCIe switched fabric. On the other hand, in IPU-Ms and IPU-POD systems the IPU devices are accessed using IPU over Fabric (IPUoF) network connectivity, based on 100G RDMA over converged Ethernet (RoCE). The V-IPU software provides the allocation, provisioning and monitoring of IPU chips and related infrastructure for machine-learning Poplar-based workloads in the IPU-POD. The IPU-specific part of the V-IPU software can run on a single IPU-Machine, when used in direct attach mode, or on a server in an IPU-POD.
You can read more details on IPU-POD systems in this section of Graphcore's documentation.
Related
I am using VmWare Workstation 14 and when I install an operating system (any of them) some programs and apps are able to identify that I am using a virtual machine.
I have seen the vm is using virtualized devices that are really named virtual. like for example VmWare Network Card or etc. Is there any way to install fake real like hardware drivers on these virtual machines? Can this simple change make the app see this vm as a real machine?
How to make this virtual machine appear as a real machine to applications?
Is there really any way?
This was asked as a yes-or-no question so my answer is:
Yes... probably. But it's a lot of work.
There's a 2006 presentation by Tom Liston and Ed Skoudis that talks about this: https://handlers.sans.org/tliston/ThwartingVMDetection_Liston_Skoudis.pdf
It focuses on VMware, but some of it would also apply to other types of Virtual Machine Environments (VMEs).
In summary, they identify as many things as they can find that would allow VM detection, which would each have to be addressed, and they also mention some VMware-specific mitigations for them.
VME artifacts in processes, file system, and/or Windows registry. These would include the VMtools service and "over 50 different references in the file system to 'VMware' and vmx" and "over 300 references in the Registry to 'VMware'", all of which would have to be deleted or changed.
VME artifacts in memory. Specific regions of memory tend to be different in guests (VMs) than hosts, namely the Interrupt Descriptor Table (IDT), Global
Descriptor Table (GDT), and Local Descriptor Table (LDT). The method by which the VM is built may allow these to appear the same in guests as they do in hosts.
VME-specific virtual hardware. This would include the drivers you mention like VmWare Network Card. The drivers would have to be removed or replaced with drivers that do not match the names or code signatures of any virtual drivers. Probably easiest to do on an open-source system, simply by modifying the driver source code and build.
VME-specific processor instructions and capabilities. Some VMEs add non-standard machine language instructions, or modify the behaviour of existing instructions. These can be changed or removed by editing the VME source code, at the cost of convenient host-guest interaction.
VME differences in behaviour. A VM might respond differently on the network, or fail at time synchonization. This could be mitigated with additional source code changes (on both host and guest) to make the network traffic look closer to normal, and providing sufficient CPU cores to the VM would help make sure it does not run more slowly than wall clock time.
Again this is from 2006, so if anyone has a more up-to-date reference, I'd love to see their answer.
I'm interested in PC firmware programming, and am just studying the UEFI spec. To my surprise, it seems like a spec for an entire OS which is embedded in firmware. You can even write UEFI "applications", which run directly using the UEFI boot services, without any other OS present.
I've found blog posts which show how to create a "Hello, world!" application which can run in the UEFI preboot environment. This is... interesting, and bizarre at the same time. I'll run my "Hello, world" programs on a regular OS, thank you.
What kind of use cases are UEFI applications actually good for? Fancy boot configuration screens? Does any "real", commercially available PC firmware use UEFI applications to implement anything more than just boot loaders and boot configuration utilities?
Anything that isn't PEI/DXE/SMM core or driver is an application, so any "real" PC have them, because BIOS Setup is actually an UEFI application. Some vendors include various other apps like firmware updaters, diagnostic and troubleshooting utilities, etc. UEFI 2.4 makes possible to add your own application with a properly filled BootXXXX/KeyXXXX variable pair and then run it by pressing a key combination during POST.
Most console applications written in C can be compiled as UEFI application by using StdLib package of current EFI Development Kit and then run in UEFI shell.
Major examples of useful UEFI apps (besides bootloaders, shell and Linux kernel, of course) are Intel ME System Tools, Read Universal, Python 2.7 and many more.
Eventually, when legacy boot will not be available anymore, all currently useful DOS utilities must either be made UEFI applications or go extinct.
Despite many valuable answers here, because I wrote couple UEFI applications myself I will try to add my 2 cents. First, what is UEFI application to just give ground what we talking about:
UEFI Specificatin v2.5:
Section 2.1.1
The major differences between image types are the memory type that the firmware
will load the image into, and the action taken when the image’s entry point exits or returns. An
application image is always unloaded when control is returned from the image’s entry point.
Section 2.1.2
When the application returns from
its entry point, or when it calls the Boot Service EFI_BOOT_SERVICES.Exit(), the application
is unloaded from memory and control is returned to the UEFI component that loaded the application.
Groups of applications that make sense in UEFI:
Configuration tools - Configuration interface for Option ROMs (ie. for storage controllers), out of band management (ie. AMT configuration tools), manufacturer performance tweaking tools
Provisioning tools - used by administrators to preload specific BIOS setting, manually setting all options in BIOS setup would be inefficient
Diagnostics tools - mostly for tests that cannot be performed in OS (DRAM tests, full storage scan, storage R/W tests, etc.). In some districts specific diagnostics tools are required in UEFI BIOS, so those can be sold to government.
Security applications - HDD encryption/decryption, antivirus scanner and anti thief applications
BIOS capability enhancement - Power Over Ethernet extensions, DRAM discovery, patching and modification of system tables (SMBIOS, ACPI)
Display tools - for displaying complex animations while running, splash screen displaying
Bootloaders - this is special type of application, which can call EFI_BOOT_SERVICES.ExitBootServices() causing termination of all memory management and passing control to Operating System.
Note that very important feature of UEFI application is that it can be added to boot order and be executed each boot time. Also UEFI application do not have to be delivered with BIOS image it can be stored in connected device memory, which is common for Option ROM configuration tools.
Here it is an example of a full blown UEFI Pre-boot Application;
There are SED SSD/HDD drives. As soon as SSD/HDD loses its power it goes into locked state (hardware-based encryption) There is no way you can get access to drive's data and all partitions on the drive are no longer even visible. Only small read-only partition (ShadowMBR) is available. UEFI firmware boots an UEFI application from that only available partition (UEFI app is written on that partition during the initialization process and when the ownership of an SED is taken). It securely authenticate user and if credentials are valid it unlocks the drive. When the drive is unlocked Shadow MBR disappears and all partitions on the drive becomes available. Then the App chain-boots the installed OS.
So if you don't have credentials you cannot even boot the OS and you cannot access the data on the drive by any means.
Here's a couple of examples:
https://github.com/NikolajSchlej/CrScreenshotDxe
UEFI DXE driver to take screenshots from GOP-compatible graphic console (yes, you can make PNG screenshots of your BIOS and save them)
http://ruexe.blogspot.com/
RU.EFI is quite an advanced tool for debugging the BIOS
Well, there are the OS loaders - both the more heavyweight ones (Windows, GRUB, BSD Loader) and the "present a menu" ones (rEFInd, Gummiboot). Shim, which enables UEFI Secure Boot for Linux platforms, consists of an application as well as installing a protocol for use by other applications.
Then you have things like the Linux kernel, which when compiled with CONFIG_EFI_STUB becomes a valid UEFI application, with the awareness of booting itself.
And firmware updates can also be shipped as UEFI applications.
The UEFI shell itself is an application.
Then there are things like factory production testing utilities, development diagnosis tools, ...
Windows 7 - 8 have UEFI installer. I'm not fully aware of the details, but I'm pretty sure this new environment gives a lot more flexibility to the developers than traditional boot environment on DVD.
Some motherboards have "instant on" features that allows you to get to a desktop screen within a few seconds. This is usually a stripped down flavor of some linux that allows you to access a web browser and play music/video. ASUS have such boards.
I know how to change boot order through bios settings, but I have a unique situation where doing it programatically would be better. The company I work for sells and supports software remotely to thousands of non tech savvy customers. We can't touch their hardware settings, we are only the software vendor.
Recently we rolled out a option for their PCI compliancy that requires a separate removable drive to store a private encryption key. Customers that use this option have to leave a usb drive with a .dat file containing the RSA key at all times. Currently this presents an issue when customers reboot. Sometimes we can walk them through over the phone how to change their bios settings to skip the USB drive, but in many circumstances we cannot, because of the caller and the other end of the phone not being tech savvy enough to change bios settings, and different PC's having different BIOS setups.
So my question is, is there any kind of ini file I can create or boot record on the disk itself than can be added or changed to cause the system to see that there is no OS on the USB, keep going down the list of boot drives. Instead, with no OS many PC's hang on Missing OS screen until we have customer remove drive reboot and plug back in after Windows starts to load. All PC's are Windows, all XP or newer.
You're talking about manipulating BIOS Setup data. Unfortunately there is no industry-standard for computers to manipulate Setup fields, like the boot sequence, so any solution is likely to be vendor-specific.
An example: Dell Inc. provides customers OpenManage Client Instrumentation (OMCI) that allows admins to remotely change settings, like boot sequence, via standard interfaces like CIM/WMI. See this whitepaper:
http://www.dell.com/downloads/global/solutions/omci_info.pdf
Especially:
OMCI is the Dell instrumentation package that enables OptiPlex™, Dell
Precision™, and Latitude™ systems to be managed remotely. OMCI
contains the underlying driver set that collects system information
from a number of different sources on the client computer, including
the BIOS, CMOS, System Management BIOS (SMBIOS), System Management
Interface (SMI), operating system, APIs, DLLs, and registry settings.
OMCI exposes that information through the CIMOM interface of the WMI
stack. Thus, OMCI enables IT administrators to remotely collect asset
information, modify CMOS settings, ...
OMCI is specific to the Dell BIOS, so it won't work with other vendors' machines. Other enterprise hardware vendors (e.g. HP, IBM) provide similar software. If you can live with a vendor-specific solution, this may work for you.
May I ask if your USB is actually non-bootable?
How did you format it? FAT32, NTFS etc?
Why can't Windows bypass this usb when booting normally when (i assume) it is not bootable. Normally my system boots to Windows OS even if there is a non-bootable usb plugged in.
BTW have you tried keeping the DAT file on usb as hidden, read only, it's worth a try.
I seem to end up evaluating a lot of software. This requires me to constantly install all kinds of things on my system. It creates a huge clutter and I spend a lot of time during the install process, and if I don't like it, then removing everything I've done. Much of my evaluation tends away from the features of the software being evaluated and toward how difficult it is to install. I'm sure I miss good software which may have actually been a better choice, because of this startup cost.
With the advent of VM software like VMWare Player and VirtualBox, it would be much easier to sell someone like me your software, if you just provided an image that I could load into the VM and run. I'd be looking at the features almost immediately rather than fighting with which revision of whatever. The VM would take care of all of this for me.
Am I missing something, or should vendors and OSS start distributing VMs for their wares?
Most of my evaluations are for server side software installed on Linux, so OS licensing is not the issue.
VMs require that the operating system have a valid license key. For free operating systems this wouldn't be an issue, but if you're developing for something like Windows machines, each time they send out a demo version of their software, they're sending out a license key that they would have to pay for.
This would be incredibly expensive for most companies.
The only downside I would say IMHO is the size of the images, if say you have a 20 MB application, do you really want to download/transfer an entire OS just for that application.
I would say a better approach would be to have a ready to go VM and then you simply take a snapshot (on Virtual Box, I assume similar feature exist in other players)
Then simply install the applciation inside your sandbox environment, and then just Zap it when done (i.e. return to your Snapshot)
Darknight
This can be done for softwre that runs on open source platforms, and VMware have a library of images which do just this (though the images that are used for evaluating commercial software is generally for infrastructure-type things that have very, very complex installation requirements):
http://www.vmware.com/appliances/
However, if the software is for the Windows platform, you don't really have the opportunity to do this, as Microsoft's Windows licensing would prevent it. Unless, you're Microsoft, of course, in which case you can in fact do this - and MS has done this to permit easier evaluation of such software as Visual Studio, SQL, and many others:
http://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/bb738372.aspx?ppud=4
Novell has an appliance builder called Suse Studio that lets you pick the software you want, it builds out a VM with the software (and dependencies, etc) for you. You can then try out the VM, download it, etc.
Whether the software you're looking for is available or not is a different matter.
Disclaimer: I work for Novell (though not with the Suse team)
But yes, if you can deal with the OS licensing issues, or possibly host trial environments yourself, this is a very effective way for a vendor to demo their app. The problem is that all vendors don't always have the infrastructure (or lack the awareness) to do so.
Microsoft provides fully-provisioned VM's for time-limited trials of their software. So if you want to trial select Microsoft products in that manner, you can do that today.
There is no sign, though, that Microsoft will make this available to third party Windows software vendors.
In the SaaS (Software-as-a-Service) world, you can get fully-provisioned virtual servers that include Windows and your software of interest on a pay-as-you-go basis, based on both Linux and Windows. For example, see Amazon Web Services
For windows, you may be better off developing a portable application that runs from a usb key. That is how Embarcadero distribute All Access. I received a 4 gb usb key that contained multiple applications. Most could be run straight from the key without installation. I believe Embarcadero will be licensing the technology at some stage.
If you are using a programming language such as Delphi or C++ with little in the way of external dependencies, a portable application is straight forward to develop. For .net, it is much harder, but can be done with Mono, or something like Virtual Application Studio.
What information have you been able to gather regarding how do the amazon web services work?
What hardware do they use
What web server
What Operating System
What storage for AWS
What virtualization software for EC2/EBS
What software for they distributed firewall for EC2
Physical location of their data centers.
I like their services very much and use them a ton at work... just out of curiosity. If you know/heard/read and want to tell, if you saw something online and want to provide a link, very appreciated.
This might be interesting: http://highscalability.com/amazon-architecture
While this question can't be answered in precision, I'll try to shed some light on internal workings that Amazon announced publicly.
Below are some details for commonly used c and m instance types, as well as recently released bare metal instances. Also,
this can be starting point for further research as specifics are far behind single answer on SO.
Compute Hardware.
If you want to take a deep dive I suggest going through all previous generations and current generation instance types. Underlying hardware can be find on this pages.
Bare metal instances
Bare metal instances became GA in April 2018. One of the details - I3.metal instances are powered by 2.3 GHz Intel Xeon processors, offering 36 hyper-threaded cores (72 logical processors), 512 GiB of memory, and 15.2 TB of NVMe SSD-backed instance storage. More info
Compute optimized instances (C)
Latest c5 (late 2017) generation instances are using 3.0 GHz Intel Xeon
Platinum 8000-series. More info here
c4 (generation is using optimized for ec2 processor Intel Xeon E5-2666 v3 (code name Haswell) processor. More info here
c3 generation introduced SSD instance storage and used 2.8 GHz Intel Xeon E5-2680v2. More info here
General purpose ec2 instances (M)
m5 instances are based on Custom Intel® Xeon® Platinum 8175M series processors running at 2.5 GHz. Most likely running on Nitro hypervisor mentioned below. More info
m4's were released back in 2015 and have custom Intel Xeon E5-2676 v3 Haswell processor optimized specifically for EC2. More info
m3's were released in 2012 and for some who remember carried some price reduction with them, making use of AWS use more appealing to audience looking through budgeting lenses. They are/were using Intel Xeon E5-2670 processor and started using SSD instance memory.
What web server
I've seen couple of times error pages from their WebUI (AWS Console) rendered via Tomcat, so I would guess this is console server.
What virtualization software for EC2/EBS
AWS recently announced (with c5 instance type announcement) that they will start using KVM based hypervisor. Presentation linked here outlines hypervisor history very good (table below taken from same page)
Physical location of data centers
This is not (and due security reasons should not) be disclosed publicly. There are always rumors / some sources about it (look at related Quora thread
You can use linux instances or windows instances in Amazon aws. But first of all you shoul run an instance and then select it's operating system. For it's storage they have an instance that called it S3. it is a storage that you can save any kind of file format in it. They have many locations for their data centers. Depending on where you live, you must select the nearest data center to work with it's services so that you have to pay less for your billing payment.
You can go to console.amazon.com and find lots of documentation for each service in help menu.