Author: Justin Sherrill

I’m breaking out the bullet points again:

• The NetBSD on a Stick idea looks interesting, in part because it’s a complete tiny system and in part because I like the name. (Via)
• The most recent @Play column draws a line between roguelike games and Dungeons and Dragons. Fun reading, if you’re the right kind of geek, or even just the right age. I think I might have to play me some Angband again.
• Oh, while talking about roguelikes: this Strafe Left cartoon. I like “sleeping zombie”.
• Also, this Procedural Content Generation wiki from an Angband variant creator. (via)
• Wow, that’s a nice gift for Perl development! (via)

It’s from back in March, but this Ars Technica article on filesystems does a pretty good job of historical coverage, though it’s doesn’t go very far into the technical specifications.

Matthew Dillon’s latest report on the state of HAMMER mentions the filesystem’s growing resilience to damage.

William Backman, that lucky guy, is at BSDCan right now. He’s also got a new interview up on BSDTalk with Justin Gibbs of the FreeBSD Foundation.

A recent ACM paper, “A Tale of Four Kernels” compares FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel in terms of code style and structure. The paper itself has a lot of blibber blabber, but it’s interesting to compare the code statistics between the different kernel types. I’d like to see a comparison between different BSD kernels; the gap between the Windows Research Kernel and Linux, for instance, is too great to be able to draw very concrete solutions. (via)

Mark Shuttleworth, the wallet behind Ubuntu, described on his blog a desire to see major Linux distributions on a common release schedule, so that major releases of associated software can match up. (via) This would be useful for the BSD world, too, though it doesn’t affect BSD releases as dramatically – Linux distributions are more important for what third-party software they handle than anything else, so their release timing is even more critical.

The various BSDs seem to be moving towards a 6-month release schedule, in any case – that’s
the stated goal for OpenBSD and DragonFly, and hopefully someone knows (please comment if you’re that someone) if there’s a known goal for NetBSD or FreeBSD.

Matthew Dillon posted a summary of work for HAMMER, noting that the last major (known) bug for undo operations is squished.  Testing is desired; please, won’t someone mangle their filesystem for the benefit of science?

Developers and Google Summer of Code students wanting to develop on leaf.dragonflybsd.org have two scripts available now for running virtual kernels. Userland networking is available as a private network, for now.

I have a number of HAMMER-related news items, so I’ll break out the bullet points:

• We have a detailed explanation of how HAMMER’s pruning system will work – follow the thread for more details and ideas.
• Matthew Dillon is trying HAMMER for his backup system. His original UFS system used hardlinks to keep all the backups together; the inodes used would be more than fsck could handle with that system’s RAM. HAMMER doesn’t need those hardlinks because of the snapshot ability, and completes the backup process much faster.
• There’s also blogbench numbers comparing UFS and HAMMER; strangely, UFS sees a performance degradation when using a large number of files when HAMMER does not. This may mean a real speed advantage or a testing anomaly; it certainly deserves investigation.

We have a page up for the AMD64 port and another for DMA enhancement. I’ve asked all the students involved to create pages, so as they finish exams, I expect more summaries to arrive.

Matthew Dillon is setting up leaf.dragonflybsd.org to support vkernels, for Google Summer of Code students that are doing kernel work. Mail Matthew with your public key and desired username if you need an account.