Better MSI support

That’s Managed System Interrupts, for when your hardware is passing a lot of data and generating a lot of corresponding hardware interrupts.  MSI is what deals with all that traffic.  High-bandwidth (10G) network cards, for instance.  Anyway, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made more commits than what I’m linking to here, for support with various devices.

There’s many other MSIs out there, oddly enough.

Merry Christmas, here’s an incredibly involved bugfix

There’s been a rare segfault present in DragonFly for quite some time.  It’s been difficult to reproduce, and the 2.12 release due some months ago was held up specifically to fix it.  Matthew Dillon was, after many days (months?) of work, able to replicate it reliably and eventually find a way around what appears to be a new AMD-specific bug.  Read his very detailed explanation of what he did to get to this point.

VFS accounting benchmarks

Francois Tigeot benchmarked his accounting work with blogbench, and posted a PDF with the results.  Dmitrij D. Czarkoff made a simpler graph, which can be used to draw the conclusion: blogbench didn’t work well for estimating the impact of VFS accounting. If you want to try accounting yourself, put vfs.accounting_enabled="1" in your /boot/loader.conf.

(The normal DragonFly mailarchive isn’t updating because it feeds from DragonFly NNTP, and that’s not updating, so I’m using Gmane for post links.)

Lazy Reading for 2011/12/18

The links are sheer entertainment this week.  No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Basic Instructions.  Well, not totally unrelated, since BSD author Michael Lucas’s tweet about it reminded me.  I’ve got the first book; I need to get the second and third.

Shopping shopping shopping!

I do this almost every year, with a little bit more every time.  Check those previous years for non-comics/books, cause that’s most of what I’ve seen lately.   I’ve recently seen a number of comics lists:

Comics/books: Wondermark gift guideWondermark store and cardsDr. McNinja storeSchlock Mercenary guideSpacetrawler (scroll down) – Secret Headquarters 1, 2, and 3 (via).

Other lists: Matthew Baldwin’s Good Gift Games list, plus his followup.  (The defectiveyeti site is funny, too.)

 

Lazy Reading for 12/11/11

Last week was low on links, but this week is great!  I hope you have some time set aside.

  • This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11.  I don’t know if I ever actually saw one and knew it before.  (via)
  • Also from the same place: Window Managers Bloodlines.
  • Anecdotal, but probably true. (via luxh on EFNet #dragonfly)
  • nginx is the new cool and unpronounceable web server these days, apparently.  Michael Lucas covers how to transition static Apache sites over to it.
  • This PDF showing slides from the recent NYCBUG presentation by Ike Levy, titled “Inappropriate Cloud Use”, is entertaining, and makes a good point.  Cloud computing is cheap on a per month basis, but since it’s a reoccurring cost, it can cost a surprisingly large amount in the long run.  (via)
  • Hey, a patch for DragonFly (and other BSD) support in Google’s leveldb.
  • Don’t Be a Free User” (via)  The last paragraph is the best.
  • An expanded grep and diff.  ‘grep’ and ‘diff’ have been present for so long, and people understand what they do, generally, that new tools get named after them just because the concept is ingrained in people’s minds.  Note that I said “generally”, as regular expressions can be difficult.  (via)
  • A lot of people don’t realize how they infringe on copyright.  This writeup describes something I’ve seen for years: people think a disclaimer that effectively says “I’m infringing but I’m doing it with the best of intentions” makes a difference.  It doesn’t.
  • So this is what that Xerox Star GUI interface looked like.  You know, the ‘first’ desktop GUI.   (via) Also, there was some advanced stuff in 1968.
  • I like this indicator light setup.  (also via luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)  There’s some other interesting old computer stuff at that site too.  I wish there still were computers like these.
  • While we’re talking about old things with a certain feel to them, why not Battersea Power Station?  Here’s some pictures.  (via)

Your unrelated link of the day: Since we’re talking about old things and environments, why not look at some pictures of my workplace?