Avalon, the machine that works as the master mirror site for DragonFly, and also as git.dragonflybsd.org, is being moved. Binary package downloads and source updates won’t work in the meantime. If you can’t wait for the system to come back, change the settings for pkg_radd or in /usr/Makefile to point at a different host.
A Phoronix test of DragonFly’s Hammer filesystem turned up, via Siju George. It’s not really a benchmark as much as it is a speed test, and it’s not a realistic comparison, but it’s interesting to see numbers.
They need a graph that shows how much historical data can be recovered by each file system, or how long fsck takes after a crash.
Update: Matthew Dillon points out the many ways these tests are wrong.
The burncd command has been removed; it hasn’t been working for some time. The sysutils/cdrtools utility cdrecord is the viable alternative. cdrecord is a pkgsrc application, but it comes on the DragonFly install CD/DVD/image/whatnot.
Ilya Dryomov wrote out some more details about his deduplication work, with some notes on what he plans next for this feature.
Here’s a nice collection of post-installation notes on DragonFly. They’re part of a larger UNIX note collection. I may have linked to it before; I don’t remember. This note’s new, though.
The end of year holidays intruded, so I haven’t had one of these for more than a week. Sorry! Merry Christmas, happy new year, etc.
- Whenever I am tempted to throw family pictures or something similar online in a ‘cloud’ service, I will reread this Jason Scott essay on the ‘Yahoo!locaust’ and come to my senses. (via)
- There’s a trade-off between size and price for SSDs. Past a certain point, any drive is generally ‘big enough’, and under a certain price, the cost doesn’t matter. We’re reaching the magic point where those two trends cross, as with this OCX Vertex 2 SSD drive, 60G in size and only $120 at Newegg. There’s lots of post-Christmas sales going on.
- How soon will SSD drives become normal and platter drives the anachronism, like single-core processors are today? It took less than 5 years for CPUs, I think… No link for this idea; this is just me theorizing.
- Tomas Bodzar pointed out this article about 1,000 core CPUs, which I dub ‘kilocore’. He also linked to these logical domain/logical partition articles on Wikipedia.
- In this day and age, a website that supports a limited number of browsers and platforms seems anachronistic. Still happens, though. (via)
- This is neat: an online, persistent space game with exploration and combat. Not EVE, but Lacuna Expanse, playable via web browser. There’s lots of browser games out there, but here’s the interesting part: the game even has a fully exposed API.
Aleksey Cheusov is putting together a package manager for pkgsrc, called nih. (For “Not Invented Here”). It’s binary-only at this point, so you’d need to run distbb or pbulk to generate packages, or download from avalon.dragonflybsd.org.
Francois Tigeot figured out how to get it to work.
Jan Lentfer’s got the 4.4 version of pf ready for testing. Filtering, queuing, redirection, NAT – all working. It has to be built into your kernel, though that’s all of 3 lines of work. Download his branch and try it.
Tim Darby asked some questions about setting up an encrypted root disk; Alex Hornung answered them. They apply to people running current DragonFly, not 2.8, but if you’re wanting to try it, why not?
I found it via Google Search. Anyone know?
Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.
Francois Tigeot has wip/jdk15 working for DragonFly/x86_64. It’s not there yet for i386…
I was reading this Perl Advent Calendar (that would be good for DragonFly, come to think of it) post about ack, and came across a interesting line:
curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3'
fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place. It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.
For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.
Tim Darby was looking to take advantage of swapcache, and got some advice from Matthew Dillon. This led to a larger writeup that went into the mechanics and advantages of both swapcache and SSDs. The swapcache(8) page has been expanded with these notes, and I’m sure I need to buy a SSD for my next upgrade.
SSD devices have tumbled into the sub-$100 range for smaller devices; they are perfect for swapcache if you’ve got the spare SATA connector…
If you have net/proftpd installed, and you installed it in the last week or so, you may want to upgrade. There’s been a security problem with the source files.
So, informal poll time: do people like these Lazy Reading roundups?
- Numbers everyone should know. (via) I link to this cause it’s interesting, and because it shows something else. If you understand what these numbers mean, congratulations. You speak a language that a limited number of people on this planet can understand. Think about that for a bit.
- The end of a faithful server. (via) I can sympathize. Run any computer for some number of years without any issues, and you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
- A simple explanation for ‘git reset –hard’. Some chunks of git are magical, in that I know they work but the internal behavior is still opaque to me. It may be best to keep it that way.
- I do gain a perverse sense of pride that DragonFly is an all-volunteer organization. Linux, on the other hand, is mostly a corporate product. (via) I realize this is not a legitimate thing, and I’d love having enough of a market that someone could be paid to work on DragonFly.
- Hey, the Economist Magazine’s Babbage blog is pretty good. I like this recent article about the Eye-Fi, a device I tell people about whenever I can. It essentially erases the need for storage on your camera. The last paragraph in the Babbage entry is also a little bit important.
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
Sascha Wildner has added even more RAID controller support, from FreeBSD, this time in improvements to the amr(4) driver. Check the green lines in this man page diff to see what’s new.