DragonFly BSD Digest » Hammer

Many upgrades, and Hammer

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:28:13 +0000

John Marino managed to update GCC from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 (4.7 changelog), zlib from 1.2.7 to 1.2.8 (changelog), and awk from 20110810 to 20121220 (can’t find a changelog).

In other update news, Matt Dillon has been working on HAMMER2′s flush sequencing.

Update: tcsh too.

HAMMER file system resizing

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 03 May 2013 02:52:24 +0000

If you’ve ever wondered about how you can resize/move a HAMMER filesystem, follow this thread for a variety of answers.

Some Tux3 notes

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 04:03:53 +0000

If you’ve been feeling the need for reading about filesystems, Daniel Phillips has posted more notes about his Tux3 filesystem design, which can be contrasted with HAMMER. (thanks, Venkatesh Srinivas)

HAMMER2 update

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 12 Dec 2012 03:51:18 +0000

Matthew Dillon has written up another update on his progress with HAMMER2. (I need to be consistent in how I write that.) He has disks being exported and mounted on other systems, and adds an explanation of some of the issues around creating reliable multi-master setups. Before you get too excited, no, multi-master isn’t working yet, and this is not production ready.

More Hammer2 work

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 03 Dec 2012 20:47:09 +0000

Matthew Dillon’s committed a bunch more Hammer2 work. No, it’s not usable yet. Look at the commit messages for details on how he’s setting up multi-master volume information, though.

More Hammer 2 in the tree

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Oct 2012 17:18:17 +0000

Matthew Dillon’s put more of his Hammer work into DragonFly, with notable parts being the creation of a ‘dmsg’ setup for advertising available block devices to share between machines using Hammer. To anticipate your next question: No, it’s not something you can run right now as a test; this is the underlying framework.

Lazy Reading for 2012/09/23

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 23 Sep 2012 15:26:12 +0000

The weather is finally turning cooler, which makes me happy.

I don’t think I’ve seen this before: Very old UNIX releases, listed for running in emulation. (via)
Where the red-black tree name came from. A red-black tree underpins Hammer 1′s data structures, though it does not in Hammer 2. (also via)
Someone with a HP passport login want to help this guy? He just needs to reinstall Windows in IDE mode, or perhaps find the right sysctl to toggle.
The acme editor, from Plan 9. I didn’t realize it’s 20 years old.
Speaking of editors, Replace in Multiple Files with Vim. I haven’t seen the argdo command before, or the Vim Ninjas site. Their color schemes article is useful just for the screenshots. (via)
Adbuntu. It’s not as bad or as inconsequential as most reactions would lead you to believe, but advertising within an OS seems heavy-handed. The BSD model has been to use the operating system as a vehicle for selling hardware, and that’s been much more successful. (see iOS, PC-BSD.)
Where Did the Internet Come From?
The map for Adventure. (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Victorian Sci-Fi. It’s not just a reference list, it’s a link to a lot of the original material, since copyright no longer applies.

Do you have offline Hammer1 slave systems?

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 15 Sep 2012 01:19:53 +0000

If you do, they don’t get cleaned up during the normal ‘hammer cleanup’ nightly routine. Chris Turner has added a way to manually specify them as a cleanup target.

I’m pretty sure in this case ‘offline’ means ‘nothing streaming to it from a master disk’. I think.

Some new Hammer features: scoreboards, shells

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 13 Sep 2012 01:15:34 +0000

These are small, but they make life easier: Hammer now has a scoreboard file, for viewing of mirror-streams running in the background. There’s also a ssh-remote directive, so you can use ssh without enabling an interactive shell, and a HAMMER_RSH environment variable so different remote shells can be used. These are all for Hammer 1.

Lazy Reading for 2012/08/26

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 26 Aug 2012 15:45:41 +0000

There’s certainly no theme to this week’s links. I even manage to avoid my usual git and vim links, strangely.

Ethernet’s Future: How Fast Is Fast Enough? The article doesn’t answer any questions, but I like the IEEE-supplied graph it opens with that shows the trend of overall network traffic doubling yearly. (via)
Anti-open source propaganda in Disney kids’ TV show. I’m actually more bothered by trying to hyphenate a phrase made from separate words. Anti-’open source’? Esoteric grammar issues appeal to me.
Bash One-liners Explained, part 3.
Perl hex and bit pack formats were added to fix the Magellan satellite’s output. A neat origin for something I’ve used trivally. Of course, I suppose any use is trivial compared to fixing output from a broken spaceship. (via many places)
Here’s a DragonFlyBSD article from 2010 linked on Hacker News. The ensuing conversation in the Hacker News comments is lucid and useful, and not a single bit of whining about BSD being dead. That’s so refreshing to see!
Looks like there will be a new version of ADOM. Will it run on DragonFly? It should, since the previous version is in pkgsrc.
Do you like set theory? Then read this. I don’t understand a word of it, but I like seeing the mathematical characters encoded on the page, apparently using MathJax.
I also enjoy reading about BSD users’ origin stories. In this case, Dru Lavigne.
CDE has been open-sourced. There’s a good chance it will show up in pkgsrc soon. Seeing this interface will make you nostalgic if you are the right age.
If you’re a fan of the Hammer filesystem, does that make you a hammerhead? That’s my weak attempt to segue to this comic.
Artisanal, hand-crafted unsigned ints. Read the bottom of the About page for an explanation. This may not make sense to you if you haven’t encountered the trend it’s making fun of, which seems to be centered in Brooklyn. (via)
I hope you enjoy scrolling, because this history of computers and history of computer graphics are very long single documents. I like seeing the early computer art. (via)

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Cul De Sac. The strip is ending due to the creator’s health issues, but what he has done is marvelous. This is one of the few newspaper strips that is both visually interesting and often abruptly laugh out loud funny, without being patronizing.

Actually trying Hammer 2

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 17 Aug 2012 21:12:54 +0000

If you wanted to try Hammer 2 and you have several DragonFly-current systems around (virtual or not), Matthew Dillon has the instructions. Keep in mind that this is not something ready for use; it can’t actually free up space, for instance. It’s neat that you can have multiple systems passing data back and forth already, though!

Hammer 2 status report

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 14 Aug 2012 20:44:32 +0000

Matthew Dillon recent posted a status report for Hammer 2. Of interest is the spanning tree protocol being built to handle messages between Hammer volumes. As he says in the message:

For example, we want to be able to have millions of diskless or cache-only clients be able to connect into a cluster and have it actually work…

(No, it doesn’t do this, yet.)

Hammer 2 messages

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 05 Aug 2012 01:02:08 +0000

Hammer 2 (or is it HAMMER2?) is nowhere near ready to test. But! For laughs, I think it could be set up just so you can watch the messages go back and forth. Someone want to set up a few DragonFly-current VMs and try?

HAMMER2 and remote mounting

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 09 Jun 2012 18:56:47 +0000

Reading this HAMMER2 commit carefully shows some future plans: remote cluster control, and the ability to mount nonlocal HAMMER2 volumes. A reminder: those are future plans, not what you can do now.

CCMS goes away, comes back

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 05 Jun 2012 20:29:06 +0000

The cache coherency management code in DragonFly has been removed, but it’s coming back under HAMMER2, as part of how HAMMER2 maintains multiple master drives.

More on HAMMER2 progress

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 19 May 2012 18:41:15 +0000

As noted in a recent commit, it’s possible to set up a HAMMER2 /usr/obj and survive a buildworld. That’s good progress.

Note that this is basic work, so features like multi-master and deduplication are not present yet, and it’s still work in progress, so don’t try HAMMER2 unless you like losing data. Watch the branch for changes, though.

(I’m going with “HAMMER2″ for the name.)

Hammer 2 progress

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 17 May 2012 03:06:02 +0000

Matthew Dillon’s recently added getaddr/setaddr support, dumping, and session encryption, among other things, to Hammer 2. Or is it HAMMER2? I’m not sure.

Hammer2 messaging

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 14 Apr 2012 03:44:20 +0000

If you’re curious about Hammer2 development, it’s been ongoing, but there haven’t been any more juicy commits to point at. Here’s one – the start of the messaging system.

Deleting too fast

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 29 Feb 2012 21:40:46 +0000

Here’s an interesting side effect that came up in Hammer 2 development: deleting files can potentially require modification of only one parent element. If I’m reading it right, that means deletion always takes about the same time, independent of the amount of data being deleted. Your ‘rm -rf /largedrive’ could complete, removing multiple terabytes of data before you realize it. I suppose it’s silly to complain about speedy results. Of course, being Hammer, it would still be available in history.

Hammer 2 branched

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 23:54:46 +0000

There’s a Hammer 2 branch in the DragonFly git repo now, for the next generation of DragonFly’s native file system. Don’t get too excited; as Matthew Dillon explains, it won’t be operational for months, and features won’t get added until much later this year. It’s neat to see the work happening, though, and there’s a new design document to show what’s coming.