Thanks to the efforts of Venkatesh Srinivas, tmpfs file systems on DragonFly can now withstand fsstress testing. Thanks, Venkatesh!
(One of the benefits of posting about people’s work is that the names are fun to type.)
Jim Brown asked about using the DragonFly logo, and as part of his request described (slightly) the BSD Professional certification exam, and how they are testing.
Two things:
- If you are running DragonFly 2.7, Matthew Dillon has made some kernel changes, so updating your 2.7 machine will require a full buildworld cycle, not quickworld.
- The binary packages for 2.6 and 2.7 have been updated to pkgsrc-2010Q2. This means that pkg_radd will automatically pull down newer packages, and you should make sure your /usr/pkgsrc is using the pkgsrc-2010Q2 release if you want to be sure there’s no version mismatches.
I recently sent out a description of what built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 , though the section on not changing the stable link is no longer true.
Anyone want to implement TCP-MD5? (RFC2385, among others.) David BÉRARD would find it useful.
Sevan Janiyan sent along news of a London *BSD meetup happening on August 26th, at The Cleveland Arms in Bayswater, starting at 7 PM.
Of course, you already knew because you watch the BSDEvents feed, don’t you? Well, you should.
Nikolai Lifanov has created a DragonFly hosting service. It’s vkernel-based, with a variety of options in disk and RAM. It’s at http://dflyhost.net/. (added to the links here, too)
Link dumps just so I can get caught up.
- Michael Lucas was interviewed about his new Network Flow Analysis (previously reviewed) book, in two parts. Also, he’s speaking at NYCBSDCon, this November 12th-14th.
- Dru Lavigne gave a talk on “Getting Started in an Open Source Community“. (via) In other video news, MeetBSD 2010 videos are available now.
- Random Google searches turned up a DragonFly installation video on Via hardware.
- Back to convention items: Kirk Russell has a short BSDCan recap. (via)
- Also, cluster ssh.
- Stathis Kamperis updated DragonFly’s One True Awk. (Huh. Brian Kernighan’s not at Bell Labs anymore.)
Matthew Dillon posted a summary of recent bugfixes in HAMMER and kqueue, which means if you are running a version of bleeding edge DragonFly build in the last few weeks, you should update.
He also mentions a “significant improvement in performance” in disk encryption. How significant? Over three times as fast.
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Samuel J. Greear has been posting news while I was off somewhere in Lake Huron. I didn’t fix it to show proper credits, for which I apologize. He’s done a wonderful job, however, and his name is now shown correctly on his posts.
I now get to actually read the past week’s Digest for recent news, for the first time ever.
Matthew Dillon sent an email to the kernel list detailing the performance improvements that he and Alex Hornung have recently made to dm_crypt and opencrypto. The disk encryption work does still come with a warning, however.
Matthew Dillon reports that DragonFly now has a catastrophic recovery tool for HAMMER filesystems, with pertinent details.
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.
You have probably seen reports declaring the demise of OpenSolaris by now, many taking a less than conservative approach in reporting the news one way or the other. So what do you make of the news? By all accounts, the source code (including future changes) for things such as ZFS will continue to be published under the CDDL. Will Oracle closing up development make it impossible for operating systems like FreeBSD to maintain ZFS without forking it? What do you think the ramifications will be for DragonFly’s HAMMER and DragonFly in general?
DSCHED_FQ was added to GENERIC, making it the default disk scheduling policy for master. You might want to refresh your memory of dsched and the fairq policy with some prior details and benchmarks.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out in the comments, adding DSCHED_FQ to GENERIC does not make it the default, but you no longer have to load the fairq module. Which raises the question, should fairq be the default?
The libevent library has been removed from the repository to ease the maintenance burden. There is some additional rationale in this tracker issue.
Matthew Dillon made a minor change to HAMMER that would help any future deduplication work. There’s also a deduplication code bounty out on the recently-updated Code Bounties page…
I’ve been NAS-shopping, and I’ve found that deduplication ability seems to add an extra zero on the end of a device’s price tag. It would be very nice for HAMMER.
Binary packages built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 are available now via pkg_radd or directly. Make sure to read my lengthy post for exact details.
On pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org, Greg Troxel proposed getting rid of gimp-print and associated packages. It’s been superseded by gutenprint-lib, so it may be worth switching now for the newer printer drivers, even if the package isn’t eliminated.