Hammer 2 status report

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.)

Lazy Reading for 2010/08/12
A light list this week, but I’ve been on an island in Canada the past week.  I can’t see much except water from there.
  • Part of the reason I started this Digest was to document things that would otherwise remain buried on mailing lists.  So I feel there’s a parallel between this and reporting on police scanners – not the same content, but the same intent.
  • The Esoteric Whodunit.  Read this article and think of the last time you were explaining something computer-related to someone, and had to change what you said in order to make it more comprehensible.
  • SSD Cache Accelerators work.  This is not news to anyone who has used swapcache(8), which does just what these hardware products do – in software, free.  Here’s where you can pat yourself on the back for being a DragonFly user.  (via)
  • Desktop 2.0 and the future of the networked operating system.  This somewhat wandering article assumes having everything go online is a good thing.

Your unrelated link of the week: The Counting Song.

Lazy Reading for 2012/08/05

I seem to include a vi/vim tip every week.  It’s not on purpose, or at least it wasn’t until now.

Your unrelated link of the week: a thorough investigation of the history of the ‘long s’ character, via.  If that’s too cerebral for you, try this video of a man making turkeys gobble, which made me laugh and laugh.

Another SSD conversation

Pierre Abbat is curious about using Hammer on an SSD.  The discussion that came from that has some useful points, including notes that a straightforward SSD as disk works for most anything with Hammer other than very intensive database use, due to the history retention.  If space is an issue, swapcache on the SSD and attaching a normal HDD is a fine alternative.  A SSD with Hammer can leave some features off, though I’d argue that dedup is totally worth is.  Also, SSD speed is directly correlated with size.

TCP Segmentation Offloading added

Sepherosa Ziehau’s added TSO support (that’s TCP Segmentation Offloading”, or “Large Segment Offload” going by Wikipedia) within IPv4 on DragonFly, pushing segmentation work from the CPU to the network card.  There’s also some DragonFly-specific improvements.

There’s been a lot of commits from him lately focused around network card improvements; they haven’t been easily summarizable, but it’s worth watching if you are interested in high-bandwidth usage and the hardware to support it.