DragonFly – Page 109 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2011/05/152011/05/14

Lazy Reading for 2011/05/15

This week: lots more reading!

Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via) The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip? Almost all of them. (tpp sounds entertaining.)
NYCBUG, in addition to having a really fun convention, has been regularly posting audio of the presentations they host. The most recent is “William Baxter’s NYCBUG presentation on The Unix Method of Development Management”. See the BSD Events tweet for the download.
What Ubuntu means. (via)
Here’s a nice explanation of Intel’s new Tri-Gate design and with it, an incidental explanation of the processor market.
This ycombinator post about Hammer2 work has an in-depth comment from Venkatesh Srinivas about DragonFly’s network setup, memory allocator, and token use. (Ignore the trolling in other comments.)
Michael Lucas’s next No Starch Press book is Absolute OpenBSD, second edition.
Pictures and video are starting to show up from the just-passed BSDCan 2011. (via this and also thesjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
My first experience of The Internet was very similar to this. It should be bizarrely unfamiliar to anyone under 20 or so. (via) Get this: I typed ‘exit’ instead of just closing the browser window when I was done messing with it, because some habits cannot be broken.

2011/05/14

Finding free memory

If you’ve used ‘free’ on Linux to find available memory, Steve O’Hara-Smith has described the way to do the same thing on DragonFly.

2011/05/14

SMP kernels on uniprocessor systems

It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on getting multiprocessor kernels able to boot on single-processor systems. This makes life a bit easier, since there’s only one kernel needed for any given processor. I don’t know if it’s in a finished state yet.

2011/05/13

Intel vs. AMD: a speed shootout

Matthew Dillon did some tests building both with an Intel i7 2600K and AMD PhenomIIx6 1090T CPU, and posted the results. He follows up with a note that the lower electricity cost of the Intel i7 makes it price-comparable with the AMD chip within a year and a half.

2011/05/13

A project reminder for the idle

For anyone who missed/couldn’t join Summer of Code, there’s still lists of potentially interesting projects, as Alex Hornung points out.

2011/05/122011/05/13

More on Hammer design

I mentioned it before, but Matthew Dillon’s updated his Hammer document, and posted about it. Read on, especially if you like extremely complex plans.

Edit: first link fixed, plus there’s a followup.

2011/05/12

Some new pkgsrc reports

I finished two builds of pkgsrc-2011Q1 on DragonFly; the reports are available. The only real breakage is security/heimdal. There’s a patch for that, though.

2011/05/11

Chromium on DragonFly: success!

Thanks to Matthias Rampke, Chromium builds on DragonFly. He’s posted with notes and even a screenshot, and has a working i386 binary.

2011/05/11

Remember to enable deduplication

I didn’t think of this, but I needed it: if you have an older Hammer system that now can perform deduplication because you upgraded to DragonFly 2.10, make sure to add it to the configuration for that file system, or else it won’t run.

2011/05/10

SSDs and how to portion them

There’s been some discussion on buying a SSD and how to match it with a hard disk, and/or swapcache. Follow the thread for more details.

2011/05/09

libgnuregex goes away

Thanks to John Marino, the one dependency needing libgnuregex is gone, as is the software itself. I didn’t even know libgnuregex was there.

2011/05/092011/05/09

Really old systems and libpthread

If you have a really old DragonFly system, meaning you’ve been upgrading it since version… 1.8 (I think?), you may have libpthread linked to libc_r instead of libxu. This means that if you have a system that old, you will now need to set THREAD_LIB or just recompile your pkgsrc programs on your next upgrade to something after DragonFly 2.10. I don’t think this is going to apply to a lot of people.

(I hope I got the lib details right…)

2011/05/07

ipf goes away

ipfilter has now been removed from DragonFly, by Sascha Wildner. We now have “only” ipfw2 and pf for software firewalls.

2011/05/07

GDB update

John Marino has updated the GNU Debugger (GDB) from version 7.0 to version 7.2. The lengthy commit message describes how surprisingly complex the upgrade proved to be.

2011/05/06

GSoC: kernel file descriptor event subsystem

And here’s one last writeup/introduction for Google Summer of Code projects on DragonFly: kevent part 2. (Apparently school exams prevented this from being written sooner.)

2011/05/05

Hammer and the future

Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about Hammer, and how to implement clustering well enough to work as a sort of RAID replacement. He’s written up a document describing his plans. Some highlights:

writable history snapshots
quotas and accounting
live rebuilds of data from mirrors
and the same history, mirroring, and snapshots as before.

It’s going to be a while before this “Hammer 2” becomes a finished product, though, so don’t count on it for the next release.

2011/05/042011/05/02

A start on TRIM support

Tim Bisson has inital TRIM support working for UFS. His lengthy posting talks about how it’s done, and shows how much it speeds things up. He’s looking for testers, so please try it if you have a SSD. (The usual warnings apply about testing code that specifically deletes things.)

For those not familiar with TRIM in SSD context, here’s the least annoying page with an explanation that I could find in a few seconds of Googling.

2011/05/032011/05/02

gcc, textinfo, and diffutils updates

John Marino’s gone on a tear and updated GCC to version 4.4.6, diffutils from 2.87 to 3.0, and texinfo from 4.8 to 4.13. Each commit message that I linked to has plenty of notes on what’s different, so they’re worth following. This is the first update for texinfo in 6 years, so the quantity of updates is not surprising.

2011/05/032011/05/02

Summer of Code work that isn’t Summer of Code

Kedar Soparkar applied for Google Summer of Code with DragonFly, but didn’t make the cut with the very few slots we have. So, he’s going to work on his i386 ABI implementation anyway. More student work is always wonderful news.

2011/05/02

Links to learn UNIX

Chatoor Kalki posted about his desire to learn about this whole UNIX/BSD/DragonFly thing, and there were several followups that may be useful to anyone interested in some reading.