Most of the dragonflybsd.org machines will be down for a short period Wednesday; this is for an upgrade that includes an SSD for the recent swapcache work. Everyone should notice a speedup, since while crater.dragonflybsd.org is getting the SSD/swapcache, a lot of crater’s directories are mounted on other machines via NFS.
I can’t keep up with all the things to post. I desperately want to clear my inbox, so here’s a week’s worth of posts all smushed together. Enjoy!
- Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work is almost ready to go.
- Francois Tigeot is looking to find supported RAID hardware for DragonFly; the LSI1068e isn’t useable. Freddie Cash listed a number of different and fully supported cards, and Francois listed some other potential choices.
- While talking about hardware, Steve O’Hara-Smith reported excellent results with a particular Atom 330-based board and DragonFly.
- Stathis Kamperis has added to ‘hammer snapls’ output; an example is in his submit@message.
- The 2.6 release of DragonFly, scheduled for March, will have version 4 of HAMMER. 2.4 has version 2. Upgrading from version 2 to 4 can happen in place, live, and only needs to happen once per volume, not per PFS. That’s about as easy as it gets. More details are available.
- The default sshd config has been updated; this shouldn’t affect your normal operations unless you’re using one of the mentioned options.
- Oliver Fromme linked to more discussion of SSD durability.
- Also, Matthew Dillon posted more notes and benchmark numbers for his swapcache work. There’s been some side benefits too. A man page for swapcache is now available.
- Aggelos Economopoulos’s libevtr has been added, for event tracing. He’s posted some additional notes on this work-in-progress.
- We now have /var/log/daemon, too.
- Notes on prepping for Google Summer of Code 2010 from the GSOC Discussion list; I don’t know if that link is readable for nonsubscribers.
- The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD is out at the end of this short month. Dru writes good books.
- Did you know FreeCiv (a Civilization clone, of sorts) is playable in a web browser? Goodbye free time! Details are available at my favoritest game site.
Phew.
James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.
I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:
- Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
- Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
- Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
- Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
- The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
- Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
- More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
- The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.
Vincent Stemen has a compiled version of the Linux Test Project available to download and run for anyone interested in helping linuxulator progress. Note that this is not a coding exercise, but rather a reporting exercise, so that we can identify what needs work in the linuxulator.
Michael Neumann presented a talk on HAMMER at the Karlsruher Institut
für Technologie on January 27th. His slides (in English) are now available in PDF or ODP formats, and are listed on the dragonflybsd.org Presentations page.
BIND has been updated by Jan Lentfer, fixing two recent vulnerabilities. His note about the update has a link to vulnerability info, for the curious. Along the same lines, Jeremy C. Reed is looking for others using DNSSEC, just to see how widespread it is.
Matthew Dillon has a summary of the development work he’s done over the past week or so. The condensed version: things faster, bugs fixed. Generally what you want to hear.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s planning to remove more old pkgsrc packages. This includes some packages like php4, which is common and also should die. There’s discussion that can be followed from the post for some details.
The economy, at least in the U.S., seems to be improving. With that in mind, I’ve seen some traffic on the freebsd-jobs mailing list lately. BSD-specific jobs are harder to come by, so take a look if you’re ‘in the market’.
Still not used to typing “2010”.
- I have no idea if bup is a worthwhile backup tool or even if it would compile on DragonFly, but more products should be described this way. (via)
- I’ve seen plenty of articles along the lines of “Open Source and X”, where the article explains at great length how open source in certain situations can work well. “Doing It Wrong” comes at it from a different direction.
- BSD Magaine is going free, meaning it’s a free download starting with the February issue. The site says “sign up for our newsletter and get every issue straight to your inbox” – the correct link is “Newsletter” on the upper right corner of the page. PDFs of the print issues are available too.
- The Open Source Business Resource is now publishing weekly articles in addition to their monthly issue. The inaugural article is “Avatar, Open Source and Humanity 2.0” by Stephen Huddart, and the second is “Do, Delegate, Defer” by the wonderfully-named Emma Jane Hogbin.
- Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX: linked many places. It’s a good argument, which reminds me… anyone want to work on DRM for DragonFly? It could use some loving.
- A Python script that takes your picture and uploads it every time a merge (in Mercurial) fails. Someone make this work for Git, please. (via)
- Speaking of Git, here’s a way to get auto-complete of git commands and local/remote branches in bash.
- The latest @Play covers the new, developing roguelike Dungeon Crawl, part 1 of many. It’s listed as running on “all the BSDs”, though I don’t see it in pkgsrc. It is playable via telnet to other servers, though.
Matthew Dillon declared his intention to have REDO working for Hammer very soon. This will improve speed by lowering the number of fsync()s needed in a given period of time to flush data to disk.
He continues in a separate message talking at length about data flushing and how to implement it efficiently, with some comparisons to work in FreeBSD. The followups are worth reading, too.
Antonio Huete Jimenez wants to find anyone working on tmpfs for DragonFly; his post about it summarizes the work so far. He’s interested in working on it, in any case.
Why, BSDTalk 184 is our very own Matthew Dillon talking about all the recent changes in DragonFly, for a good half-hour! I’ve listened to about half of it so far… I hadn’t realized the significance of some of the changes in the last two releases. It’s also strange to hear someone mentioning the work you’ve done (pkgsrc bulk builds)…
Jan Lentfer’s posted the steps to test OpenSSL encryption – I link to them because it’s interesting to see the steps spelled out.
Jan’s also posted a patch to enable DNSSEC support throughout BIND and related tools. Test if this interests you. (and it should.)
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.
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.)
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.
As previously noted, some of Matthew Dillon’s work was potentially destabilizing. The “danger period” (I saw no issues reported) is over.
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.