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.
Is it possible to boot with only 48M of RAM in a DragonFly system? Probably not. 128M would be better. I usually talk about the lower memory limit for Hammer, since it's so relatively low for a snapshotting file system, but the converse applies here. 128M is probably the comfortable lower limit, though it's pretty hard to find a system that would limit you that way without doing it on purpose. 128M sticks of RAM are practically disposable these days, really.
Thanks to John Marino's work, it's now possible to build the DragonFly kernel and world using gold, and have it work. You just have to set WORLD_LDVER to make it work. I don't think there's any user-visible change from this, other than a tiny speedup in building. I don't know if any other BSD is using gold yet.
Alex Hornung added support for rdrand(4), the random number generator built into some Intel CPUs. That would be Ivy Bridge CPUs, which aren't released yet, so it hasn't been tested... but you're covered for that day in the future when they arrive.
Take a look at the schedule if you've been thinking about going... (seen via multiple places) This is as good a time as any to point out, once again, the very valuable BSD Events Twitter feed.
That's exactly what Michael Lucas talks about in this recent post; using ssh to browse from a different machine, but using a local web browser. He uses it to get around a network problem, but I imagine there's a number of other applications. This is one of the valuable tips from his recent book.
Hello new DragonFly 3.0 users! This is my not-about-DragonFly weekend link roundup. I'll be back to regular DragonFly-ish stuff tomorrow.
- Vim anti-patterns, Gnuplotting, and Computing History At Bell Labs. I'm combining what would normally be 3 separate points because I stole them all from Christian Neukirchen's blog. I wish I had found them first.
- I mentioned Dungeons & Dragons last week, which led Michael Lucas to point out Dungeon Crawl Classics in the comments. Along that same theme, here's some 70's role playing game illustrations. (via) There's a parallel between computing in the late 1970s and fantasy; expert programmers were called wizards, understanding computers was an esoteric art... I could develop the heck out of that thesis, but let's just look at the pictures and feel nostalgic instead.
- And then everything got a lot more weird-looking, 20 years later! (via)
- Hey, that time zone lawsuit mentioned here before was dismissed. That's good news. (via lots of places)
- Hyperpolyglot: Scripting. Look for your favorite scripting language and compare it side-by-side with others. (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- The text of the DragonFly 3.0 announcement gets copied around to a lot of sites, far more than I'm linking here. However, I found this one entertaining because it kind of makes it sound like DragonFly is just what I happened to come with.
- Custom 3D printing is becoming accessible enough that I'm trying to think of things I could get printed that way, even though I don't need it. (via I lost it, sorry)
See the release page for details. This release took longer than normal because of a crazy bug hunt, but the payoff is that this version performs better than ever.
Note: The x86_64 GUI ISO image had a problem due to file size (over 2G); redownload if you've had trouble booting it.
I was reading an article about how Tumblr scaled to handle the huge amount of data it's regularly pushing out. Apparently, it started life as a traditional LAMP stack, but they've since moved on - to software packages I have not yet needed to ever use. Being open source software, it all has crazy names. Some of these packages are perfectly familiar to me now, but others are completely new.
Anyway, for fun, I decided to see how many of these sometimes new-to-me packages were present in pkgsrc. I'll reproduce a paragraph from the story that lists the software they use, and link each one that I found in pkgsrc.
- Apache
- PHP, Scala, Ruby
- Redis, HBase, MySQL
- Varnish, HA-Proxy, nginx,
- Memcache, Gearman, Kafka, Kestrel, Finagle
- Thrift, HTTP
- Func
- Git, Capistrano, Puppet, Jenkins
The "Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique" is mirroring DragonFly - it's on the mirrors page or you can just go right to it if a French mirror is useful to you.
Apparently this is a good week for Lazy Reading links, cause I have lots! If you have any specific suggestions of where to find more links, I'd welcome them. I'm sure there's more people to follow that come up with tidbits like these...
- Coding Tricks of Game Developers. A mix of genuine techniques and deadline near-misses. (via)
- Insane Calculations In Bash. Ostensibly, it describes all the work required to convert number series to "sparks" (inline UTF-8-based graphs) using bash. What it really shows is how far down the paths of madness shell programming can take you.
- From the same person, It Came From The Hold Space, a description of how crappy things could be pre-1990 or so when, say, sed was the most capable tool you had. Read the presentation description first. Bonus: the presentation explains a non-acronym source for the name "grep".
- Hey, I've seen that logo before. (via Koston on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Mounting files from the web. (via luxh, same place)
- Here's a Google Summer of Code success story that made me feel good just for having participated.
- "If a new edition of Dungeons & Dragons doesn't have an option which enables it to be easily played by a moderately inebriated person who isn't good at math, it is a failure."
- Hey, Window Maker finally got updated. (via) It was always my favorite window manager.
- Michael Lucas published his sales numbers so far for SSH Mastery. (reviewed by me here, totally worth buying) The interesting takeaway for me was that despite the reach of Amazon, Smashwords was more profitable - and I like the variety of Smashwords' DRM-free formats more.
- I'm linking to this mention of open source operating system cost estimates mostly cause I like the phrase "Debian for the most part is a package repository."
- Hey, that's cute. (Make sure your terminal is wider than 80 columns to see it.)
Your unrelated link of the week: Cyriak. An animator in the UK; I like the rhythmic repetition in his (occasionally disturbing) animations.
As I mentioned last week, DragonFly developer Venkatesh Srinivas is collecting pledges for his crazy-long bike ride, raising funds for cancer patient support. Not to put too fine a point on it, but my mother died from cancer in a long, agonizing process some years ago. The support system funded by these pledges would have helped us tremendously. Please donate a few dollars to ease someone else's burden.
This is the version that the OpenBSD Project is selling, so the profit goes to the people who made OpenSSH. It's an excellent idea.
I'm planning to tag the 3.0.1 release of DragonFly this weekend. There's still a few bugs, so if you are able to help, please do. Otherwise, they will be errata.
Michael Lucas installed WHMCS, a commerical hosting management tool, on FreeBSD. He tells a story of doing so, and in the process happened to list all the PHP modules needed for it to run. I'm linking it because that list is going to come in useful for someone, someday.
Will Backman interviewed me for BSDTalk, talking about DragonFly 3.0 and all the stuff around it. I can't listen to it it's my own voice do I really sound like that aaaargh.
For the curious and technically oriented, Hammer 2 development can be watched directly by looking for any commits marked 'hammer2'. There's been a lot, and if you want to see the code as it flows in, here's your chance.
If you've noticed the main dragonflybsd.org website being down, that's because both network connections (on different networks!) serving it are down. This makes the website unavailable, and the source code, but you can still pull down images, packages, and the like from avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Hopefully this warning will be out of date soon.
Note: It's back.
Hey, it's snowing here! Finally.
- I remember when fractal zooming would bring a desktop computer to its knees. Now, you can do it in a web browser. (via) This exists as a standalone application (x11/XaoS) too.
- I see content from here get splogged, from time to time, and I think that's what's happening here. Someone throws "BSD" into a content generator, with ads slapped on top of it? Honestly, I'm not sure what it is. (via)
- Hammer 2 work is starting, as noted earlier this week. Let's see some details on a similar filesystem project, btrfs. (via)
- You should quit Facebook because privacy etc. you've heard it from me before. The arguments are getting more thorough, though.
- Here's an article from independent game developer Jeff Vogel about serving a niche with your independent work. I like his writing, plus if you squint your eyes and sorta look at that article's point sideways, you could construe it as relevant for BSD.
- For fun, spot the two things I mention/link to here frequently, in this somewhat hypey article about Tumblr. (via)
- An Economist article about shifting from computer to computer. I read that and realized the one computer constant for me isn't my desktop - it's "~".
- If you ever played games on the Amiga, you may want to watch this movie. It's clips from a lot of Amiga games. By a lot, I mean an hour and a half of footage total. There were some really advanced games for the time there. (via)
There's 7 bug reports to close before releasing DragonFly 3.0. Most of them have dumps to go with them, so each one should be solvable. Please take a look if you have the time and inclination,