Really old systems and libpthread

If you have a really old DragonFly system, meaning you’ve been upgrading it since version… 1.8 (I think?), you may have libpthread linked to libc_r instead of libxu.  This means that if you have a system that old, you will now need to set THREAD_LIB or just recompile your pkgsrc programs on your next upgrade to something after DragonFly 2.10.   I don’t think this is going to apply to a lot of people.

(I hope I got the lib details right…)

Hammer and the future

Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about Hammer, and how to implement clustering well enough to work as a sort of RAID replacement.  He’s written up a document describing his plans.  Some highlights:

  • writable history snapshots
  • quotas and accounting
  • live rebuilds of data from mirrors
  • and the same history, mirroring, and snapshots as before.

It’s going to be a while before this “Hammer 2” becomes a finished product, though, so don’t count on it for the next release.

A start on TRIM support

Tim Bisson has inital TRIM support working for UFS.  His lengthy posting talks about how it’s done, and shows how much it speeds things up.  He’s looking for testers, so please try it if you have a SSD.  (The usual warnings apply about testing code that specifically deletes things.)

For those not familiar with TRIM in SSD context, here’s the least annoying page with an explanation that I could find in a few seconds of Googling.

GSoC: dsched BFQ, virtio, LVM mirror

Yay acronyms! Brills Peng was accepted for the Summer of Code project “Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy” – and now there’s a nice writeup describing what’s planned. Also, Stéphanie Ouillon did the same thing for the virtio drivers project.  Adam Hoka also joined in with a summary for his LVM mirror project.  Please keep this up, students.

dragonflybsd.it available

If you are a European resident, Federico Biancuzzi has the DRAGONFLYBSD.IT domain name available to donate. He doesn’t want to let it go and have it taken by a domain squatter. Talk to him at sale@securitydaemon.com if you want to hold on to it for some unspecified time.