Significant AMD64 code committed

Matthew Dillon has committed a significant amount of work from Jordan Gordeev’s Summer of Code project, for AMD64 support. (It is very close to being able to completely boot an AMD64 kernel) As he says in the commit message, the code is the product of many folks, but with much credit to Jordan Gordeev for getting the work to this point. As far as I know, Jordan will continue working on this past the Summer of Code, which makes it a double success.

Hammer streaming

Matthew Dillon’s committed some initial support for streaming mirroring.  With this, two disks can be synchronized over a network link of any speed or reliability – it can be restarted and immediately begin where it left off, and the amount of bandwidth used can be controlled.  This sounds neat.

Hammer: disconnect with impunity

Matthew Dillon posted a July 16th Hammer update where he details causing a lot of write activity on a USB-connected, Hammer-formatted hard drive, and then yanking the USB connector out. Apparently, doing that 50 times over didn’t even faze Hammer. (Of course, be careful trying that with power.) He’s been committing a lot for Hammer, along with Sascha Wildner and Thoman Nikolajsen. A side benefit is that the Hammer work has exposed some issues in CAM.

Bonus link: Matthew Dillon talks about ‘purposeful destabilization‘, and man pages for hammer(8) and mount_hammer(8) are now available online.