DragonFly – Page 136 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/01/062010/01/06

Too much ram: it’s possible

I’ve always said you can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM. (I’m paraphrasing a quote from the Dutchess of Windsor.) However, maybe you can have too much RAM. Recent changes by Matthew Dillon have made it possible to run the kernel_map out of RAM depending on the quantity of video RAM and system RAM in use.

This isn’t a significant danger; I’m highlighting it because it’s an odd problem. It’s easy to work around for now. There’s a new utility, kmapinfo, to show mow much kernel memory is being used.

2010/01/06

Hammer downgrade and upgrade bug

Thomas Nikolajsen experienced firsthand a bug where downgrading a Hammer PFS master to a slave and then later making it a master again lost all data. Lucky him… The problem’s now fixed.

2010/01/05

Crypto testing needed

Jan Lentfer needs someone with cryptographic hardware that isn’t padlock (e.g. not VIA) to test his recent OpenSSL upgrade. Do you have hardware that matches? Please help.

2010/01/05

vr(4) driver fixup

Jan Lentfer noticed a lot of errors with his vr(4) card under load. Matthew Dillon suggested some reasons/fixes, and then made a commit that may fix it. Please test if you have an older Rhine card.

2010/01/04

MPSAFE details

In response to a question about fine-grained vs. coarse locking, Matthew Dillon detailed the locking types used by DragonFly and the remaining work left to make the system able to function completely without the Giant Lock. (hint: VM, something Matt’s known for.)

2010/01/04

dragonflybsd.org fixed

There were some errors with the dragonflybsd.org domain, which are now fixed. This includes some issues in NNTP access to the discussion groups, which is why I don’t have a link for this.

2010/01/02

Update for spamassassin

This has been bouncing around other news outlets, but I’ll mention it here: There’s an out of data SpamAssassin rule that can potentially mark mail as spam because of the 2010 date. A mail to tech-pkg@netbsd.org describes the various fixes.

The step of ‘sa-update && /etc/rc.d/spamd restart’ seems to have fixed it for me. Incidentally, if you are using SpamAssassin, sa-update is a good tool to run on a regular basis.

2010/01/02

cryptodev support added

Jan Lentfer has added cryptodev support in openssl. What does that mean? It means that separate encryption hardware can be used to offload the computation needed to encrypt data for OpenSSL. Look at the crypto(3) man page for details.

2010/01/02

Bleeding edge made less sharp

As previously noted, some of Matthew Dillon’s work was potentially destabilizing. The “danger period” (I saw no issues reported) is over.

2009/12/30

Messylaneous for 2009/12/30

It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.

Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE. This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too…
pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel. Will it work for other BSDs? I hope so, eventually.
The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 – give if you get a chance. Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets? I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video. (via) Kernighan’s book, “The Practice of Programming“, with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.

2009/12/29

4k disk sector support

Newer disks are moving to 4KB sectors (more info), instead of the 512-byte sectors that have been in use for… decades? There’s been some recent discussion on how to support this, for booting DragonFly. It should otherwise work.

2009/12/282009/12/28

Chaos Communication Congress notes

Matthias Schmidt is posting to Twitter about his time at 26c3 with other DragonFly developers, on his own feed and in @dragonflybsd. (if you are reading this via a Twitter link, you may already know that.) Follow the #26c3 tag if you want to see all the news about the event. A quick scan shows some interesting mobile phone security problems have been discovered. There’s streaming video too.

2009/12/282009/12/28

Multiprocessor work so far

Matthew Dillon is working on moving more of DragonFly out from under the Giant Lock. This may mean some instability this week if you’re following the bleeding-edge. He’s already posted a warning and an explanation (with numbers!) of work already completed.

2009/12/272009/12/27

pfSense on a podcast

BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called “FLOSS 101 Weekly”, now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense. (via) It’s a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly – specifically, the installer.

2009/12/25

Pkgsrc-current packages tested

I (that’s Justin Sherrill, for those reading this other places than the Digest) finished a build of pkgsrc-current on DragonFly 2.4.1 – these packages are available, though soon to be outdated by the pkgsrc-2009Q4 release, due 2010/01/01. This build was mostly to check compatibility before the release.

2009/12/23

Messylaneous for 2009/12/23

Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist. And he used DragonFly!

Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play. Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld?

Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly – I am a big fan of that idea.

top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.

2009/12/21

lwkt_token speedups and other improvements

Matthew Dillon has refactored the lwkt_token code, for an unspecified speed improvement. He’s been doing a lot of MP-lock cleanup recently…

2009/12/20

Avalon (and therefore pkg_radd) is up again

Avalon.dragonflybsd.org was power cycled, so pkg_radd works now, as does git.dragonflybsd.org.

2009/12/20

MPLOCK graphing

I love love graphs, and Alex Hornung has created a graph showing the lock contention on a DragonFly system during a buildkernel. (ganked from EFNet #dragonflybsd on IRC)

2009/12/20

Package download problems

avalon.dragonflybsd.org is temporarily down, so pkg_radd will not work unless you set $BINPKG_BASE to a new mirror.