Huge cleanup for games

Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9).  This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.

I draw attention to this not because it changed anything with the games in a functional sense, but because it’s huge (450 files changed, 31450 insertions(+), 29998 deletions(-)) and because it came out of nowhere.  It’s always nice to have new surprise contributions arrive.

Hammer REDO and other storage notes

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.

Too much ram: it’s possible

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.

Update for spamassassin

This has been bouncing around other news outlets, but I’ll mention it here: There’s an out of data SpamAssassin rule that can potentially mark mail as spam because of the 2010 date.  A mail to tech-pkg@netbsd.org describes the various fixes.

The step of ‘sa-update && /etc/rc.d/spamd restart’ seems to have fixed it for me.  Incidentally, if you are using SpamAssassin, sa-update is a good tool to run on a regular basis.