Hi All,
Rush 102.42a9 was released on 06/10/2008 -- upgrade is Free
to all existing customers. You can use your existing license files.
Mainly this release has 'below the surface' changes for fixes,
optimizations, and features for advanced users (FIFO, job remarks..)
Go here to take the free upgrade:
http://www.seriss.com/rush/upgrade-102.42a9/
Or see the new main page (you may need to hit "reload")
http://www.seriss.com/rush/
102.42a9 Highlights
-------------------
IRUSH THEMES
------------
http://www.seriss.com/rush-current/irush/images/irush-themes.jpg
Visually, little has changed except Irush now has 'Themes' which
let you control the overall color of the interface. There are a few
preset themes, and you can also create your own (if so motivated)
by editing the new rush/etc/.irush-themes ascii file. (FUELVFX/CISHOLLYWOOD)
FIFO SCHEDULING
---------------
http://www.seriss.com/rush-current/rush/rush-conf.html#Sched
FIFO scheduling (off by default) causes jobs of equal priority
to run in 'first submitted, first served' order, instead of the
older 'round robin' behavior (which IS the default).
With FIFO enabled, jobs submitted recently must wait for older jobs
(unless the older jobs cap their cpu counts or the newer
jobs have higher priority)
'rushadmin' also has a new section for changing this option.
(BSGVFX/SOHOVFX/ROMEYZOIC/ARRI)
JOB REMARKS
-----------
"Job Remarks" have been re-instated after accidentally falling out
of the release stream due to a source code regression.
So now you can again control the "REMARKS" for a job with:
rush -jobremarks "Some comment"
..and IRUSH has a "Job Remarks" field as well. (ZOIC/ENGINEROOM)
SUBMIT SCRIPTS
--------------
* 3delight has been added.
* fusion script now handles ConsoleSlave
* nuke script has been "standardized"
* shake-quicktime script has much better codecs support
* most all submit scripts now support the -field and -help command line
flags to allow external apps to preset any of the submit fields.
LOW BANDWIDTH "FRAME NOTES"
--------------------------
'rush -exitnotes "some message"' can be used by render scripts
to efficiently modify the "NOTES" field in the 'Frames' reports.
This is better for Rush than using 'rush -notes'.
Especially if the notes will be changed for *every frame*.
The older 'rush -notes' was only intended for rare error conditions,
not high volume situations where NOTES changed for *every* frame.
'rush -exitnotes' is more efficient, piggy-backing the custom message
as part of Rush's existing UDP protocol for delivering frame completion
messages to the job server.
For example, if you want the render script to parse the ram use and poly counts
from the renderer's output, and have these totals shown in the NOTES field
on a per frame basis, eg:
STAT FRAME TRY HOSTNAME PID JOBID START ELAPSED NOTES
Done 0001 1 tower 7355 ontario.15 06/09,13:35:10 00:05:03 POLYS=102430,RAM=524M
Done 0006 1 tower 0 ontario.15 06/09,13:35:10 00:05:01 POLYS=102343,RAM=538M
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
..'rush -exitmsg' is perfect for this. Use it in place of 'rush -notes'
whenever you want to add "frame notes" just before exiting. (LAIKA/CISHOLLYWOOD/..)
'rush -push' NOW PRESERVES EXECUTABLE FLAGS
-------------------------------------------
Some folks were using 'rush -push' to move around the S99rush file,
but 'rush -push' wasn't preserving the executable bit. This has been fixed.
'cpu.acct': EVENTS FOR DAEMON STATE CHANGE AND LOG ROTATIONS
------------------------------------------------------------
When processing the cpu.acct file to determine processor utilization,
it was realized it would be useful to known when online/offline events
occurred, and when log rotations were made, to assist in calculations.
(CISHOLLYWOOD) See the new 'r' and 's' events:
Rotated log ('r'):
http://www.seriss.com/rush-current/rush/rush-cpu-acct.html#LogRotationEntries
State change ('s'):
http://www.seriss.com/rush-current/rush/rush-cpu-acct.html#DaemonStateChange
BUG FIX: WINDOWS 49 DAY WRAP PROBLEM
------------------------------------
Under Windows, machines that were up longer than 49 days
would sometimes not recognize newly released license.dat files
or rush/etc/hosts files. This has been fixed. (BSGVFX)
LOG DIRECTORY PATHNAME CONVERSIONS
----------------------------------
A new "logdir_convert" command was added to the rush.conf file
to allow sysadmins to have Rush's log directory pathnames
automatically convert between "Unix" and "Drive Letter" style
paths for SAN drive configurations.
Normally UNC pathnames solved all problems. But with SAN
configurations on Windows machines, UNC pathnames can't be used..
you are often forced to use drive letters. This works fine if
you're an "all Windows" shop, but is tricky if you have a mix
of Windows and Unix, as it's fairly hopeless to get unix to
understand drive letters.
"logdir_convert" was added to solve this. So to convert logdir
pathnames between Unix style /foo/bar/xxx and Windows S:/xxx
would be to add the following to all the rush.conf files:
os=windows logdir_convert "/foo/bar" "s:"
os=unix logdir_convert "s:" "/foo/bar"
This way on Windows machines the Rush service will convert
"/foo/bar/xxx" into "S:/xxx", and on unix machines (mac, linux)
"S:/xxx" would be turned into "/foo/bar/xxx". Logic in the scripts
can handle the rest of the conversions.
OPTIMIZATIONS
-------------
Three major optimizations were made to prevent "chattiness" among
the rush daemons when certain situations arose:
* One optimized situation was when a large number of running frames
were requeued (killing them), there was a pattern of chattiness
that made the job server daemon unresponsive for a minute or so
after, sometimes longer. (TURNER)
* Fixed a problem where irush was supposed to optimize large selections
of frames (eg. highlighting 7000 frames and hitting 'Que') into
ranges. This optimization code was accidentally disabled when floating
point frame ranges were added; the code was reinstated to ensure large
operations run efficiently. (TURNER)
* Another optimized situation was jobs getting chatty when trying
to get available cpus busy when Ram settings were being used to
prevent jobs from using them. (LAIKA/AURYN)
IRUSH LICENSE WARNINGS
----------------------
Irush's on-screen license expiration warnings are now more
dynamic; the warnings change if irush remains open for long
periods, detecting new license files, and updates the number
of days as time progresses. The older irush would leave the
same message up during the entire time it remained open.
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