Full buildworlds again, as there’s more commits that make it necessary. If you’re running 2.7, you should probably just plan on using buildworld, and not quickworld for rebuilding.
Month: August 2010
08/30/2010
Another recompile
System data structures have changed again, so make sure your next rebuild is a full buildworld/buildkernel if you’re running 2.7. There’s been a lot of changes to pull more and more out from under the Giant Lock.
08/29/2010
More BSD Show!
The BSD Show!, the show I didn’t know was there, already has more 20 minutes more of content; an interview with Adam Hamsik about NetBSD.
They’re looking for more guests, too…
08/28/2010
Minor software hiccup possible
happened to notice that recent libkinfo changes broke sysutils/estd. It’s fixed by rebuilding the program, though this may affect a few other packages. This only affects people running bleeding-edge DragonFly 2.7.
08/27/2010
Google Summer of Code 2010: everybody wins!
All three of the Google Summer of Code Projects for DragonFly are complete and passed! The code for each will show up at the Google-hosted project page in the next week or so. The original proposals for Alex Hornung’s device mapper/LVM, Samuel Greear’s kevent/select/pool work, and David Shao’s GEM/KMS porting are still there on the Google project page for DragonFly.
arcmsr(4) added
Sascha Wildner has brought in arcmsr(4), an Areca RAID controller driver. Please try it if you have the right hardware.
There’s a BSD Show?
There’s a podcast titled “The BSD Show!”, which I didn’t know. What’s more, it has 15 minutes of Warner Losh speaking about FreeNAS. That’s the 4th broadcast so far. (via)
(added it to the links, too)
08/25/2010
tmpfs gets tougher
Thanks to the efforts of Venkatesh Srinivas, tmpfs file systems on DragonFly can now withstand fsstress testing. Thanks, Venkatesh!
(One of the benefits of posting about people’s work is that the names are fun to type.)
Logo request, certification details
Jim Brown asked about using the DragonFly logo, and as part of his request described (slightly) the BSD Professional certification exam, and how they are testing.
08/24/2010
HEADS UP: structure changes, pkgsrc changes
Two things:
- If you are running DragonFly 2.7, Matthew Dillon has made some kernel changes, so updating your 2.7 machine will require a full buildworld cycle, not quickworld.
- The binary packages for 2.6 and 2.7 have been updated to pkgsrc-2010Q2. This means that pkg_radd will automatically pull down newer packages, and you should make sure your /usr/pkgsrc is using the pkgsrc-2010Q2 release if you want to be sure there’s no version mismatches.
I recently sent out a description of what built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 , though the section on not changing the stable link is no longer true.
TCP-MD5, anyone?
Anyone want to implement TCP-MD5? (RFC2385, among others.) David BÉRARD would find it useful.
08/23/2010
London BSD meetup
Sevan Janiyan sent along news of a London *BSD meetup happening on August 26th, at The Cleveland Arms in Bayswater, starting at 7 PM.
Of course, you already knew because you watch the BSDEvents feed, don’t you? Well, you should.
DragonFly hosting available
Nikolai Lifanov has created a DragonFly hosting service. It’s vkernel-based, with a variety of options in disk and RAM. It’s at http://dflyhost.net/. (added to the links here, too)
08/22/2010
Messylaneous: books, conventions, videos, conventions
Link dumps just so I can get caught up.
- Michael Lucas was interviewed about his new Network Flow Analysis (previously reviewed) book, in two parts. Also, he’s speaking at NYCBSDCon, this November 12th-14th.
- Dru Lavigne gave a talk on “Getting Started in an Open Source Community“. (via) In other video news, MeetBSD 2010 videos are available now.
- Random Google searches turned up a DragonFly installation video on Via hardware.
- Back to convention items: Kirk Russell has a short BSDCan recap. (via)
- Also, cluster ssh.
- Stathis Kamperis updated DragonFly’s One True Awk. (Huh. Brian Kernighan’s not at Bell Labs anymore.)
Updates and improvements for HAMMER, crypto
Matthew Dillon posted a summary of recent bugfixes in HAMMER and kqueue, which means if you are running a version of bleeding edge DragonFly build in the last few weeks, you should update.
He also mentions a “significant improvement in performance” in disk encryption. How significant? Over three times as fast.
08/21/2010
BSDTalk 195: Mike Larkin, ACPI, OpenBSD
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Proper credits
Samuel J. Greear has been posting news while I was off somewhere in Lake Huron. I didn’t fix it to show proper credits, for which I apologize. He’s done a wonderful job, however, and his name is now shown correctly on his posts.
I now get to actually read the past week’s Digest for recent news, for the first time ever.
08/20/2010
Softcrypto work in master
Matthew Dillon sent an email to the kernel list detailing the performance improvements that he and Alex Hornung have recently made to dm_crypt and opencrypto. The disk encryption work does still come with a warning, however.
08/17/2010
New HAMMER catastrophic recovery tool
Matthew Dillon reports that DragonFly now has a catastrophic recovery tool for HAMMER filesystems, with pertinent details.
08/16/2010
Summary of recent kernel work
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.
08/15/2010
What of OpenSolaris?
You have probably seen reports declaring the demise of OpenSolaris by now, many taking a less than conservative approach in reporting the news one way or the other. So what do you make of the news? By all accounts, the source code (including future changes) for things such as ZFS will continue to be published under the CDDL. Will Oracle closing up development make it impossible for operating systems like FreeBSD to maintain ZFS without forking it? What do you think the ramifications will be for DragonFly’s HAMMER and DragonFly in general?
08/14/2010
fairq disk scheduling now default
DSCHED_FQ was added to GENERIC, making it the default disk scheduling policy for master. You might want to refresh your memory of dsched and the fairq policy with some prior details and benchmarks.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out in the comments, adding DSCHED_FQ to GENERIC does not make it the default, but you no longer have to load the fairq module. Which raises the question, should fairq be the default?
No more libevent
The libevent library has been removed from the repository to ease the maintenance burden. There is some additional rationale in this tracker issue.
08/13/2010
Dedup, please
Matthew Dillon made a minor change to HAMMER that would help any future deduplication work. There’s also a deduplication code bounty out on the recently-updated Code Bounties page…
I’ve been NAS-shopping, and I’ve found that deduplication ability seems to add an extra zero on the end of a device’s price tag. It would be very nice for HAMMER.
pkgsrc-2010Q2 binary packages available
Binary packages built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 are available now via pkg_radd or directly. Make sure to read my lengthy post for exact details.
08/12/2010
gimp-print may go away
On pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org, Greg Troxel proposed getting rid of gimp-print and associated packages. It’s been superseded by gutenprint-lib, so it may be worth switching now for the newer printer drivers, even if the package isn’t eliminated.
08/11/2010
Testing the iphdr branch
Matthew Dillon’s updated his iphdr branch of DragonFly, and he’s looking for testers. In this version, IP headers aren’t switched to host byte order, reducing complexity. If you like transmitting data, this would be a good one to test.
08/10/2010
Messylaneous: SSDs, GPL, HACK, books, UNIX, oldwww
I almost had an all-acronym title, darnit.
- Theodore T’so’s writing about SSDs. It’s Linuxish, so not all the problems he finds would apply to DragonFly, but interesting in the detail level.
- The WordPress Theme Fiasco. (via) I link just so I can say that BSD licensing certainly takes away some of these headaches.
- How to get Vim to highlight HACK the same as XXX.
- How many books are there in the world? (via) I find this strangely interesting, probably cause I like books.
- 10 Great Unix Tools (via).
- The oldest web page, via Prof. Dr. Style, also a good read. I still reflexively assume web links that contain a ~ must be more authentic and personal than any other. (via).
08/09/2010
More pf stuff: a review
Jan Lentfer’s looking for code review; specifically these patches. It’s for pfsync and carp, part of his recent pf upgrade.
Places to go, exams to take
Dru Lavigne has listed conventions she’ll be at over the next few months, so if you feel like taking a BSDA exam or just plain helping out at a BSD booth, check the list.
08/08/2010
Huge packet filter update
Jan Lentfer has updated pf (and pflogd and ftp-proxy) in DragonFly to match what was in OpenBSD 4.1. Why this intermediate step? pf went through a lot of changes after OpenBSD 4.1, so this was easier than jumping right to the current version – which he plans next.
In any case, this was a huge and difficult job, with somewhere around 10,000 lines of code added, and very useful for DragonFly. Jan also managed to keep the DragonFly-specific features working, where “no state” is the default, along with features like fairq.
08/07/2010
Building a device list, checking it twice
Stathis Kamperis was looking for a way to list all disk devices and the associated serial numbers. Matthew Dillon described a manual way to find it. That manual method could be turned into a single shell script, if anyone wanted a small shell programming task.
iwn(4) support updated
Among other things, Joe Talbott has brought in support for the 6000 and 6050 series of iwn(4) wifi devices.
08/06/2010
Even more numbers
Samuel Greear has even more benchmarks for his kqueue work. This time, he took an example server from Unix Network Programming, and tested various permutations. His post has the relative timings for each server type.
08/05/2010
Stress out!
Sascha Wildner brought in FreeBSD’s stress2 stress testing suite. It’s an efficient way to crash your system. Look at the README to find out the fastest way there.
Selective wakeups, with numbers
Samuel J. Greear posted a note about his Summer of Code work, focusing on selective wakeup. He outlined his strategy, and then posted benchmark numbers – using Apache, lighthttpd, and a minimal web server he wrote just to show the improvements from selective wakeup.
08/04/2010
ALTQ now in GENERIC kernel configs
Matthew Dillon has added ALTQ to the GENERIC (and X86_64_GENERIC) kernels, since there’s no module version to add later. Make sure to include it in your custom configs, if desired.
(I always worry that I’ll miss some new kernel option when upgrading, but also don’t want to go over my whole kernel config just in case.)
twa(4) updated
Sascha Wildner has pulled in a bunch of updates for twa(4), adding more devices for this SATA RAID device driver. There’s a list of what’s supported now on the man page.
Messylaneous: vi, Pomodoro, Git
Some links! I normally would save this for a Lazy Reading Sunday entry, but I want to clear the backlog:
- 10 vi tips and tricks. (via)
- Pomodoro Technique, a way of breaking work into half-hour chunks to keep yourself productive. (via)
- More unusual Git tips. (via)
- 10 Differences Between Linux and BSD. Not that exciting, but I like the anecdote in item 4.
08/03/2010
Keep updating if you are on 2.7
Samuel J. Greear just updated his recent kqueue work with some fixes. If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.7, you should update to catch what it fixes.
Russian BSD?
The publishers of BSD Magazine are planning to launch a Russian issue in September, but they need more native speakers (and writers, and proofreaders, etc.). olga.kartseva@bsdmag.org is the person to contact if you can fit one of those roles.
August OSBR: Interdisciplinary Lessons
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Interdisciplinary Lessons”. September’s theme will be “Keystone Companies” and October will be “Sales Strategy”. If you want to contribute to those issues, articles are due by the 15th of the month before.
08/02/2010
New Features page for DragonFly
Matthew Dillon created a new Features page on the DragonFly site; it lists the technologies added to DragonFly from over the past few years.
A new BSD Blog!
Dru Lavigne’s started a PC-BSD Blog. This is great news – I don’t tend to cover other BSDs because I think there’s enough space in the blogosphere to others to do it. (and I only have so many hours in a day.) Dru’s already shown she knows posting, so I’m very happy to see more specific BSD outlets.
08/01/2010
BSD Magazine for August is out
The August issue of BSD Magazine is ready. It’s titled “BSD as Operating System“, and it’s available for download now.
