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Messylaneous for 2010/02/16

It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!

  • PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel.  The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
  • Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default.  This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
  • An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
  • In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs.  In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size.   Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’.  (via)  I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
  • Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.
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Cache-data-as-swap project started

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.

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Things that are done

There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!

  • Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it.  He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on the way too.
  • Binary pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.4.x/i386 are all uploaded.
  • I finished a build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.5.x/x86_64 – take a look and fix some of the broken items, if that interests you.
  • Weekend reading: check out this Trivium post as there’s some interesting historical items.  I may try that LackRack idea in a environment that doesn’t fit a normal rack well…
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Huge cleanup for games

Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9).  This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.

I draw attention to this not because it changed anything with the games in a functional sense, but because it’s huge (450 files changed, 31450 insertions(+), 29998 deletions(-)) and because it came out of nowhere.  It’s always nice to have new surprise contributions arrive.