Justin Sherrill – Page 223 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/11/062011/11/06

Lazy Reading for 2011/11/06

A bumper crop of articles to read this week.

Ruby went to a BSD license. That’s nice to see. Commence licensing argument in 3… 2…
DragonFly BSD on Ohloh hasn’t been updated in months – it should be noticing new commits automatically. Don’t know why. Any more vigorous users of Ohloh that know why?
“Which OSS clustered file system should I use?” The commenters point out something that many people mix up: RAID redundancy is not backups.
I always enjoy accounts of completely ineffective break-in attempts.
In praise of “crap” technology. I must admit, I love just looking at stuff like what Brando sells, or various surplus sites. It’s never high-end fancy, but that is part of the appeal, as the linked article notes.
Think of this speech the next time someone asks you for help online, no matter how accessible the answer.
20 years of Vim. Vim started on the Amiga, of all places. That would make vi itself about eleventy kajillion years old. Does it predate the release of 1BSD? I don’t know. Looking at a BSD family tree to see what I could learn, I also found that QNX was originally QUNIX. I didn’t know that either. Everything leads back to UNIX, really. I look forward to Jeremy C. Reed’s book about this early history…
This electronic music site entertains me, for it is also available in amber. (You have to have seen monochrome monitors circa 1982 or so to understand…)
Speaking of 1982, you may enjoy Nintendo Legend, CRPG Addict, and Blogging Ultima. (via trevorjk on #dragonflybsd IRC)

Random unrelated link for the week: “War Photographer“. This animation makes me so happy.

2011/11/032011/11/03

Structure changes mean recompilation

This recent structure change (are there others like this? Maybe?) means that existing binaries may need to be recompiled for anyone tracking DragonFly master. This probably means that an upgrade from 2.10 to 2.12 will require rebuilds of all binary pkgsrc packages.

2011/11/02

COMPAT_43 and COMPAT_DF12 gone

Well, they’re still available, but you don’t want them in your config any more because they can slow you down. This will only affect you if you are running binary files from DragonFly 1.2 or earlier, or… I guess a 4.3 BSD binary? From 1986? I’m sure there’s some other reason for it to be there.

2011/11/01

More multi-core improvements

Matthew Dillon wrote up an explanation of how performance on systems with a lot of CPU cores has been significantly improved – up to 300%! (He says 200%, but I think he’s treating it as a percentage of a whole rather than percent changed.) Apparently finally getting rid of lock contention is the trick.

2011/10/31

Libhammer added

Antonio Huete Jimenez’s ‘libhammer‘, a library to make various Hammer functions available to userland programs, has been added. It implements ‘hammer info’ only at this point, if I understand correctly.

2011/10/31

Postgres performance speedups, possibly

Samuel Greear, Jan Lentfer, and others are looking at Postgres scaling on DragonFly. The work they are doing isn’t in the tree yet, but here’s a graph showing some of the performance differences.

2011/10/302011/10/30

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/30

It’s snowing in the northeast U.S., which makes me happy! Keep going, sky!

Richard Stallman’s requirements when giving talks/lectures. (via) I read this not unreasonable but long list and thought about it. Every requirement on there probably has an experience/story behind it… (“If you can find a host for me that has a friendly parrot, I will be very very glad.” – so this)
Continuing the famous computer people trend of dying, John McCarthy died. He invented LISP (((insert parentheses joke here))) among other things, and wrote this story. (also via)
I mentioned issues over the time zone database previously, but there’s a new home, and we’re still getting updates in DragonFly.
And, it’s Dennis Ritchie Day. (via) That linked article does a good job of describing just how universal his influence has been.
64-bit ARM chips. (design PDF) This is just the announcement, but I bet these will be a good porting target in the next year or two if these designs wander out into the general market. (via many places)
I’ve linked to similar deals before, but this one’s quite cheap: the Power Squid power strip sold as surplus. I find the design and name both great.
Speaking of names, “I think Dragonfly is the coolest, cuz of the name.“
I like this article on web advertising just because it has blocked-out screenshots that show exactly how much space gets used up by ads.

Unrelated link of the week: Manly Guys Doing Manly Things. Most of the jokes revolve around games you may or may not know, with the occasional realistic experience that I’ve had myself.

2011/10/292011/10/29

Reduced memory usage

Francois Tigeot does something very useful: he monitors the resource usage on his systems, and tracks how it changes over time. Because of that, he noticed that the recent VM changes in DragonFly have made quite a difference in memory usage. (See the green area in the attached chart, around week 42.)

2011/10/29

DragonFly and jails

Michael Lucas is building jails on DragonFly, and his story of doing so works pretty well as a how-to guide.

2011/10/28

GCC updated

John Marino’s moved GCC from 4.4.6 to 4.4.7, but you’ll have to see the changelog for details. Except it’s so new it isn’t listed… yet.

2011/10/27

Got 10G Ethernet? Here’s an improvement

Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes that led to a 10% and then 20% gain (don’t know if that was cumulative or separate) in network speed for DragonFly. That’s great! It only has a noticeable effect if you’re on 10G Ethernet, though. The obvious answer to that: upgrade your network.

2011/10/27

BSD Magazine for October

It’s out, titled “The Inevitability of IPv6”, and featuring an article by yours truly on the upcoming DragonFly release. (I thought it was already published? I’m not sure.)

2011/10/262011/10/26

A new Hammer presentation

Francois Tigeot recently presented a set of slides about Hammer at a recent Irill conference. PDFs of the slides are available at his site, in English and French.

2011/10/262011/10/26

DragonFly and Postgres and testing too

DragonFly’s now on the BuildFarm list of Postgres test systems. (via Jan Lentfer in IRC)

2011/10/252011/10/24

Some pkgsrc bulk build comparisons

Here’s some recent x86_64 bulk builds: one on DragonFly 2.11, one on NetBSd 5.0.2, and one on Linux 2.6.37.4. Some data of note: DragonFly is within 8%-ish total packages built compared to NetBSD, which could be considered the baseline. Linux, the more common platform for most of the software built, is another step less. I don’t know if there’s any dramatic conclusion to get from this other than, “Hey, a lot of packages build on DragonFly!”

2011/10/24

BSDDay 2011 in Slovakia

Did you know that there’s a BSDDay 2011 in Bratislava, Slovakia, on November 5th? Well, I do thanks to a random Google search and now you do too. You and I both need to keep watching BSD Events.

2011/10/24

Graphing the recent VM changes

Samuel Greear graphed the performance differences for Postgres and MySQL on DragonFly, before and after the recent VM changes. Note that 1: this was done a little while ago, so I think the performance difference would be even greater now, and 2: this was graphed versus the already-performing-better 2.12, not the current stable release of 2.10.

2011/10/232011/10/23

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/23

Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.

The best obituary I’ve seen yet for Dennis Ritchie, where he’s contrasted with Steve Jobs.
The best paper abstract ever.
Michael Lucas documents his DragonFly update.
Our tcplay TrueCrypt implementation is getting noticed.
pkgin-0.51 is available in pkgsrc-current, though it’s not in the most recent quarterly release.

Your unrelated comics link for the week: Oglaf. This week’s OK, but it’s frequently NSFW, and frequently hilarious.

2011/10/21

Google Code-In for 2011

Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects. DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done. However, we need ideas, the more the better. Please add whatever comes to mind.

2011/10/202011/10/20

Got an r600-based video card?

That would be a recent ATI card, though I don’t know exactly which model name. Samuel Greear has imported David Shao’s DRM work, originally for Summer of Code, last year. Most newer Radeons should work (?).