Matthew Dillon has made another change to HAMMER, which may (he doesn’t say explicitly) require another newfs. After the first HAMMER release, there will be a clear upgrade path for times like these.
Matthew Dillon’s latest report on the state of HAMMER mentions the filesystem’s growing resilience to damage.
William Backman, that lucky guy, is at BSDCan right now. He’s also got a new interview up on BSDTalk with Justin Gibbs of the FreeBSD Foundation.
A recent ACM paper, “A Tale of Four Kernels” compares FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel in terms of code style and structure. The paper itself has a lot of blibber blabber, but it’s interesting to compare the code statistics between the different kernel types. I’d like to see a comparison between different BSD kernels; the gap between the Windows Research Kernel and Linux, for instance, is too great to be able to draw very concrete solutions. (via)
It was recently discovered that Debian Linux had modified SSL encryption to inadvertently generate weak keys from 2006 until very recently. SSH on DragonFly now includes a tool to check for this issue, and will deny people using those weak keys.
Mark Shuttleworth, the wallet behind Ubuntu, described on his blog a desire to see major Linux distributions on a common release schedule, so that major releases of associated software can match up. (via) This would be useful for the BSD world, too, though it doesn’t affect BSD releases as dramatically – Linux distributions are more important for what third-party software they handle than anything else, so their release timing is even more critical.
The various BSDs seem to be moving towards a 6-month release schedule, in any case – that’s
the stated goal for OpenBSD and DragonFly, and hopefully someone knows (please comment if you’re that someone) if there’s a known goal for NetBSD or FreeBSD.
Sepherosa Ziehau posted a number of benchmarks to show the general improvements in packets-per-second volume with his recent networking changes. As is appropriate when comparing values, he created and links to lots of graphs to illustrate the improvements.
Matthew Dillon posted a summary of work for HAMMER, noting that the last major (known) bug for undo operations is squished. Testing is desired; please, won’t someone mangle their filesystem for the benefit of science?
Developers and Google Summer of Code students wanting to develop on leaf.dragonflybsd.org have two scripts available now for running virtual kernels. Userland networking is available as a private network, for now.
Matthew Dillon posted another update on HAMMER filesystem progress; the structures are changing enough to require a newfs’ing to any existing HAMMER volumes. There has been a significant speed boost, however.
I updated this DragonFly system from 1.12.1 to 1.12.2 Sunday night, and PHP (and therefore this WordPress-based Digest) stopped working. Dion (dblazakis in #dragonflybsd) found the reason and fixed it, for which I am very grateful.
I had a number of posts I had made ahead of time, so there’s no actual gap in posts from when the server wasn’t responding. Make sure you catch the past few days of articles.
I have a number of HAMMER-related news items, so I’ll break out the bullet points:
- We have a detailed explanation of how HAMMER’s pruning system will work – follow the thread for more details and ideas.
- Matthew Dillon is trying HAMMER for his backup system. His original UFS system used hardlinks to keep all the backups together; the inodes used would be more than fsck could handle with that system’s RAM. HAMMER doesn’t need those hardlinks because of the snapshot ability, and completes the backup process much faster.
- There’s also blogbench numbers comparing UFS and HAMMER; strangely, UFS sees a performance degradation when using a large number of files when HAMMER does not. This may mean a real speed advantage or a testing anomaly; it certainly deserves investigation.
I spy with my little eye (well, with Google) patches to Python for DragonFly support. This is part of a bunch of other fixes he put together. Thanks for doing the work, Hasso!
Sepherosa Ziehau has a new networking patch that gives a 250Kpps performance boost under certain conditions. He’s looking for more hardware testers before next weekend, so if you have a network card on his list, give his patch a try.
We have a page up for the AMD64 port and another for DMA enhancement. I’ve asked all the students involved to create pages, so as they finish exams, I expect more summaries to arrive.
Matthew Dillon is setting up leaf.dragonflybsd.org to support vkernels, for Google Summer of Code students that are doing kernel work. Mail Matthew with your public key and desired username if you need an account.
One of the big wins for BSD has been the packaging system. It’s very easy to use ports or pkgsrc to download all the dependencies for a given application automatically, and even Linux tools like yum or apt-get handle this nowadays.
Ruby, Perl, Python, and etc. have the disadvantage that if you write a interpreted script that uses libraries not in the standard distribution of that language, users of that script need to perform additional software installation, assuming they have access to do so, just to run that script. This is a major disadvantage compared to “compiled” software. To overcome this, additional steps that turn the script and needed libraries into a single executable are required.
‘_why the lucky stiff’ has a solution that matches: Shoes, a Ruby GUI toolkit, goes and gets any needed libraries as part of its startup process. Why didn’t someone think of this 10 years ago so that it could be commonplace?
Dru Lavigne has news of the OSS Census now supporting BSD systems for counting; it’s good to participate and provide evidence of the number of BSD users out there.
She also has one of her infrequent but useful link posts up; check it and find more to read.
Google’s reporting that Unicode is finally becoming more popular than ASCII. This news is probably of most interest to non-English speakers, but it’s a good thing. How is DragonFly’s Unicode support – can someone comment? (Via)
I posted a little about this before, but here’s more prompted by several people mentioning it: a seekdir() bug found and fixed by Marc Balmer is apparently present in all BSDs, going back at least 25 years. 25 years! That’s older than some of you reading this post. His blog post delivers a very nice summary. (Thanks, Undeadly, Richard, Nega)