Matthew Dillon and Venkatesh Srinivas have committed several fixes for some elusive problems. If you’ve had an unexplained crash, this may keep it from repeating. If you haven’t had a wierd crash (like me)… great!
Did you notice zgrep went missing? Well, it’s available again, thanks to YONETANI Tomokazu.
The Open Source Business Resource, linked here before, has become the Technology Innovation Management Review, or TIM Review. Conveniently, the editor is named Chris, not Tim, so nobody will get confused. It’ll still cover open-source software, but it’ll also
“share the spotlight with topics such as managing innovation, technology entrepreneurship, and economic development”
The first relaunched issue will be out in October.
A position opened up for a junior systems administrator at my workplace. You have to be willing to live near Rochester, NY, administrate a mix of Windows and unixy machines, do desktop support, and network management. (e.g. everything possible) The work environment is neat, informal, and somewhat adverse. I’ll have a job description soon, I hope.
Michael W. Lucas is setting up two DragonFly machines, to try out Hammer. I linked to his tweet about this in the last Lazy Reading post, but this is a more in-depth explanation of what he’s doing. So far, it just works. (as seen on Reddit, too.)
I finished a build of pkgsrc-current on x86_64, with a report on what built. I’ve kicked off a new build, and I expect at least 100 more packages to build thanks to John Marino’s work on pkgsrc and DragonFly.
Want to create getcontext for DragonFly/x86_64? Apparently we need it.
The freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc has been extended another week, to October 2nd. This will push the DragonFly 2.12 release out a ways, too.
This week’s Lazy Reading just built itself up quickly; autumn arrives in the northern hemisphere and suddenly a lot more activity starts going on.
- 9vx, Plan 9 as a user process. (sorta like a vkernel?) Via Sascha Wildner on IRC.
- Found at the same location: You are not expected to understand this.
- Michael W. Lucas, sometime BSD author, has 3 short horror stories available for free, for a limited time. Be warned; there’s no BSD in these stories, as far as I can tell. In fact, they contain genuine horror, not “and then… the server ran Windows ME!” kind of nerd horror.
- Also from Mr. Lucas, it’s always nice to see DragonFly hit production.
- A nice explanation of the recent TLS vulnerability. (via)
- Chumby creator Bunnie Huang’s look at future hardware is optimistic, but I like it. If nothing else, it implies easier driver support. If that names seems familier, Bunnie’s MicroSD saga was previously linked here. (via)
- This short Overcoming Bias post is about nanotech, but a certain sentence in there struck me as a good way to determine how you plan out your computer infrastructure (via):
There are four ways to deal with system damage: 1) reliability, 2) redundancy, 3) repair, and 4) replacement.
I’ve put together a catch-all ticket for remaining issues to fix before the 2.12 release of DragonFly: Issue 2135. Several of the issues have already been dealt with by Peter Avalos and Sepherosa Ziehau, so a hat tip for them!
As is common for the combination of new Postgres releases and new pkgsrc quarterly releases, Postgres 8.3 is going to be missing from pkgsrc-2011Q3. The default version of Postgres installed by pkgsrc will become 9.0 after that quarterly release. (9.1 is already present in pkgsrc.) This is all planned by Joerg Sonnenberger.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH to version 5.9p1. This might be the last thing before the next DragonFly release.
Update on the update: he updated OpenSSL (1.0.0e) and file (5.09) too.
As predicted and now announced, pkgsrc is now frozen for the next week. If everything goes well, we’ll have pkgsrc-2011Q3 next week.
Francois Tigeot has done another set of benchmarks using blogbench to test reading and writing under different DragonFly versions, plus some OpenIndiana benchmarks just to mix it up. Writing performance seems to have drastically improved between DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.
His post has an attached PDF with, of course, graphs. This site has previously mentioned other not-really-comparable disk testing performed by Francois.
I might have a job open at my workplace soon, for a junior admin/support/network role. (Department is too small for narrowly defined roles…) I’ll post about it here if it happens.
- libguestfs, ‘tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images’. (via) I can think of a lot of places that could be useful.
- I did not know this, but FreshBSD tracks DragonFly commits, along with the commit logs of most (all?) other BSDs.
- Bruce Perens set up a “Covenant” license for the HPCC database (powers Lexis/Nexis) that is actually pretty good at allowing something to be both open source and commerical; the ‘release notes‘ talk about it.
- I agree with these sentiments on hiring exactly. If you really like what you do, you don’t just do it at work. (The author’s followup.) Putting it in a more positive light, showing work on open source, outside of your workplace, is a great thing to add to your resume. Never trust the graphic designer with sloppy handwriting.
- The majority of the 10 most stable web providers out there are running a BSD. FreeBSD, in this case. (via, via) (why does Twitter make it so hard to link to things? Cause they don’t want you reading the web – just them.)
- Usenet, as of 1981, with posts arriving in actual time (-30 years). (via) You can even use a NNTP reader to connect. Similar to but not as colossal as telehack, mentioned here before.
- DragonFly deployment.
- I am so proud of myself for coming up with this joke.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It used to mostly be violent and nonsensical, but recent strips are excellent, like this one or this.
I proposed some changes to the way DragonFly does releases, and how we handle pkgsrc binary builds. The thread on kernel@ is a bit long, so just read my summation. My idea for a longer release cycle didn’t really fly, but pkgsrc binaries will be built on a rolling basis, I think.
From what I can tell, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made some changes where you can control TCP timeout and keepalive timing on a per-tcpcb basis, or at least that’s what I gleaned from the docs. He’s been doing a lot of work lately, but it’s hard to link to because so much of it is at a basic level that makes it difficult to summarize in terms of how the features affect the user.
DragonFly had another good year with Google’s Summer of Code program. We had 6 slots, and 5 passed projects. (Irinia, if you’re reading this – where did you go?) This is our 4th year participating in Summer of Code, with I think the highest number of passed projects to date.
Here’s all the finished projects, with links to the original descriptions:
- Bring kernel event notification in DragonFly BSD to its logical conclusion – Samuel Greear
- Implementing a mirror target for device mapper – Adam Hoka
- Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy – Brills Peng
- Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD – Nick Prokharau
- Porting Virtio Drivers from NetBSD to DragonFly BSD to speed up DragonFly BSD as a KVM guest – Stephanie Ouillon
Thanks is also due to the mentors and other that helped out, via IRC and email: Aggelos Economopoulos, Alex Hornung, Joe Talbott, Matthias Schmidt, Michael Neumann, Nathaniel Filardo, Pratyush Kshirsagar, Sascha Wildner, Thomas Nikolajsen, and Venkatesh Srinivas
You can also check the Digest’s “Google Summer of Code” category for progress reports made as the summer went on. The source code from the projects is available at the DragonFly/SOC 2011 Google Project Page. In even better news, 2 of the projects have already been partially committed to DragonFly – Brills Peng’s scheduler work, and Adam Hoka’s device mapper mirror project.
For reasons unknown to me, there’s enough functional change between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 that it affected a lot of PHP-based programs. For that reason, PHP 5 in pkgsrc defaults to the 5.2 version. However, it’s going to be 5.3 for the next stable quarterly release of pkgsrc. In theory, all PHP5-dependent programs are ready to handle that now. Note that PHP 5.3 is already in pkgsrc; it just wasn’t the default. If you were using the php53 package, it may require some manual fiddling at your next upgrade of pkgsrc packages.
Some ISA devices have been removed from DragonFly. That probably affects approximately 0% of everyone, cause they’re old devices, but a few of them are were in the GENERIC kernel configs, so you’ll get an error for an unrecognized option when you next rebuild your kernel using a GENERIC-based config, based on an older version of GENERIC. The description of which drivers went is quite sensibly placed in UPDATING.