While we’re talking about file system improvments, Venkatesh Srinivas has been removing the Giant Lock from tmpfs.
Yeah, so those Phoronix benchmarks are crap, but Matthew Dillon went and implemented some things that would speed up Hammer write performance in any case. Read his summary for details.
I removed the Google ad off the sidebar; it was making me enough cash to buy a sandwich on a yearly basis.
I’ve replaced it with a link to my Amazon wishlist. If you’re feeling generous, you can buy me a book! If you aren’t, you can just keep reading, and I’ll keep posting.
The default Hammer version in DragonFly is now version 5, which is the one that includes deduplication. Enjoy, bleeding-edge users! Otherwise, wait for the next release.
Version 6 is there, but don’t upgrade to it yet; there aren’t significant user-visible changes, and the usual disclaimers for new versions apply.
Sascha Wildner is continuing his huge driver-adding streak, this time with tws(4). It’s a port of the FreeBSD driver, for “LSI 3ware 9750 series SATA/SAS RAID controllers”. The commit message has a list of individual models, and further credits.
Sascha Wildner re-added burncd(8); it still works for some people. As Matthew Dillon pointed out, cdrecord is probably the better long-term bet.
Avalon, the machine that works as the master mirror site for DragonFly, and also as git.dragonflybsd.org, is being moved. Binary package downloads and source updates won’t work in the meantime. If you can’t wait for the system to come back, change the settings for pkg_radd or in /usr/Makefile to point at a different host.
Sascha Wildner continues the driver update streak, bringing in the updated FreeBSD version of the aac(4) driver. This adds support for 40+ Adaptec AdvancedRAID cards – the aac(4) man page has a very long list.
A Phoronix test of DragonFly’s Hammer filesystem turned up, via Siju George. It’s not really a benchmark as much as it is a speed test, and it’s not a realistic comparison, but it’s interesting to see numbers.
They need a graph that shows how much historical data can be recovered by each file system, or how long fsck takes after a crash.
Update: Matthew Dillon points out the many ways these tests are wrong.
The burncd command has been removed; it hasn’t been working for some time. The sysutils/cdrtools utility cdrecord is the viable alternative. cdrecord is a pkgsrc application, but it comes on the DragonFly install CD/DVD/image/whatnot.
Ilya Dryomov wrote out some more details about his deduplication work, with some notes on what he plans next for this feature.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is titled “The Business of Open Source”. The first article, titled “Cost Optimization Through Open Source Software“, explains why iXSystems is all BSD, all the time. There’s also an eye-opening breakdown of the dramatic cost savings from going with open-source rather than Windows.
Apparently the surplus money from the recent NYCBSDCon is going to each of the BSD projects. Great news! Now, what to do with it…
Ilya Dryomov has added live deduplication, or as he titles it, “efficient cp”. It’s experimental and turned on with a sysctl, so approach with caution.
Here’s a nice collection of post-installation notes on DragonFly. They’re part of a larger UNIX note collection. I may have linked to it before; I don’t remember. This note’s new, though.
Xerox Network Services is gone from DragonFly. Does anyone, anywhere, use this protocol? Ironically, I don’t recall this even being visible on the Xerox hardware products I have at work.
The end of year holidays intruded, so I haven’t had one of these for more than a week. Sorry! Merry Christmas, happy new year, etc.
- Whenever I am tempted to throw family pictures or something similar online in a ‘cloud’ service, I will reread this Jason Scott essay on the ‘Yahoo!locaust’ and come to my senses. (via)
- There’s a trade-off between size and price for SSDs. Past a certain point, any drive is generally ‘big enough’, and under a certain price, the cost doesn’t matter. We’re reaching the magic point where those two trends cross, as with this OCX Vertex 2 SSD drive, 60G in size and only $120 at Newegg. There’s lots of post-Christmas sales going on.
- How soon will SSD drives become normal and platter drives the anachronism, like single-core processors are today? It took less than 5 years for CPUs, I think… No link for this idea; this is just me theorizing.
- Tomas Bodzar pointed out this article about 1,000 core CPUs, which I dub ‘kilocore’. He also linked to these logical domain/logical partition articles on Wikipedia.
- In this day and age, a website that supports a limited number of browsers and platforms seems anachronistic. Still happens, though. (via)
- This is neat: an online, persistent space game with exploration and combat. Not EVE, but Lacuna Expanse, playable via web browser. There’s lots of browser games out there, but here’s the interesting part: the game even has a fully exposed API.
Aleksey Cheusov is putting together a package manager for pkgsrc, called nih. (For “Not Invented Here”). It’s binary-only at this point, so you’d need to run distbb or pbulk to generate packages, or download from avalon.dragonflybsd.org.