Jan Lentfer has updated wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and while there’s already some postive reports, he’d like more testing in the wild. Give it a run if you’re already using the prior version.
The first online-only free version of BSD Magazine is out! It’s good, but there’s no DragonFly, darnit. Anyway, it’s worth reading if for no other reason than it’s in pleasant, colorful PDF format.
James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.
I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:
- Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
- Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
- Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
- Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
- The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
- Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
- More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
- The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.
Matthew Dillon is setting up DragonFly to be able to use a fast disk (like a SSD) for disk cache, reducing the effect swap has on speed. This means very large amounts of data could be read into memory – greater than the available RAM in the system – without having the normal paging out problems that happen when memory is exhausted. It’ll work for any filesystem on the machine – HAMMER, UFS, or NFS. His inital notes have more. Other notes include details on the NFS benefits, and possibilities with SSDs. Wear-leveling may make SSDs last much longer.
Work has started, and there’s an update (with examples) that people can try, though it may destroy all your data at this point. Test results in that update show, if I’m reading it right, a better than doubling of speed on a repeated md5 test on a large file when using the new caching system. This should be a huge benefit.
The packages from a bulk build of pkgsrc-2009Q4, on DragonFly 2.5.1 for x86_64 have all been uploaded to avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Go ahead and upgrade using pkg_radd if you’ve got the right hardware for it.
Thanks to some work by Tim Darby, the SiI 3124 SATA controller is now supported. This, like other SiI devices, should be able to handle hotplugging…