April 2011 – Page 3 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/04/032011/04/03

Lazy Reading for 2011/04/03

Getting into the swing of this link collection thing…

The first paragraph of this things magazine post is about the “lingering memory of the space of ancient video games.” It’s good; follow the links to read. It also mentions the excellent This Gaming Life book, which is on the shelf to the right of me as I type, and can be read in full online. (though it’s worth buying.)
This made me laugh.
How to kill your online community. Good guidelines for how to (not) act.
This week’s “Only the Internet could produce this”: Einstein vs. Hawking, the rap battle.
pcc is now at version 1.0.
Anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar? I’m sick of mine.

2011/04/022011/04/02

Double buffering in Hammer usually useful

Enabling the vfs.hammer.double_buffer=1 sysctl will greatly improve Hammer performance when you’ve exceeded your memory cache (at a possible slight penalty when you have not) and also speed things up when using live deduplication.

Update: Venkatesh Srinivas says:

“double_buffer makes sense when: 1) you want all CRCs to be checked on reads. 2) you’re running live dedup and care about dedup performance rather than say read-heavy performance; 3) you have swapcache but are often running into the vnode limit in what you can cache.”

So, not always useful.

2011/04/02

binutils, Hammer updates

Sascha Wildner has updated the default version of binutils in DragonFly from 2.17 to 2.21. You’ll want to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade, if you’re running DragonFly 2.9.

Also, Matthew Dillon has made version 6 the default version of Hammer in DragonFly 2.9. Version 6 has improved handling of directory names in some circumstances. Just don’t ask me which, cause I lost track. It’s been a hard day!

2011/04/01

Pkgsrc packages possibly pruned

There’s a number of pkgsrc packages that have a combination of security vulnerabilites and lack of updates for more than a year which is placing them on the chopping block. (Follow the discussion to see which ones make it off the list.) The removals will happen after the next branch, pkgsrc-2011Q1, which is itself due in two days.