Matthew Dillon’s added support for IGD chipsets, found in various N450-based netbooks. It was tested on a Gateway LT2104u, for instance. I didn’t realize there still were Gateway computers.
If you need to talk about/sell the Google Summer of Code idea to people, Google now has a set of templates for GSOC presentations. Use them to drum up interest, or persuade someone to mentor/be a student.
It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!
- PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel. The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
- Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default. This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
- An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
- In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs. In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size. Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’. (via) I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
- Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.
For those of you wanting to try swapcache: Newegg is running a deal today: 30G OCZ SSD for $90. That’s after a mail-in rebate, though.
The installer now sets a /boot size of 768M by default; more space for kernels and modules, plus disks these days can take it.
Incidentally, if you’re compiling new versions of your kernel, it’s a good idea to copy your kernel file to kernel.good, and then use that to boot if the version you then compile doesn’t work. Someday, that will totally save you.
Guy Harris found a problem with non-blocking reads from a BPF device that’s common to DragonFly, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. It’s fixed in DragonFly.
The disklabel64 program will permanently be ‘disklabel’ from now on, with the original disklabel sticking around as disklabel32. This is for a number of reasons, including 4k physical sector size in newer drives, which is still causing problems for other operating systems.
Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer: Constantine A. Murenin. He’s responsible for the sensors framework, and is already busy.
Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work has been added, with some further changes. There’s a skeletal man page to look at.
Pulled from a larger conversation: a description of the settings for a HAMMER filesystem, and what they mean. I can tell from experience that extremely active disks will need extra cleanup time…
Matthew Dillon fixed a strange error on boot that had been plaguing some systems. The problem appears to be some sort of timing issue related to SMP and to other factors as strange as which USB port was being used. The commit message has more details.
NFS on DragonFly now defaults to readdirplus mounts, which improves directory read speeds. Testing for speed and compatibility is advised.
Most of the dragonflybsd.org machines will be down for a short period Wednesday; this is for an upgrade that includes an SSD for the recent swapcache work. Everyone should notice a speedup, since while crater.dragonflybsd.org is getting the SSD/swapcache, a lot of crater’s directories are mounted on other machines via NFS.
I can’t keep up with all the things to post. I desperately want to clear my inbox, so here’s a week’s worth of posts all smushed together. Enjoy!
- Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work is almost ready to go.
- Francois Tigeot is looking to find supported RAID hardware for DragonFly; the LSI1068e isn’t useable. Freddie Cash listed a number of different and fully supported cards, and Francois listed some other potential choices.
- While talking about hardware, Steve O’Hara-Smith reported excellent results with a particular Atom 330-based board and DragonFly.
- Stathis Kamperis has added to ‘hammer snapls’ output; an example is in his submit@message.
- The 2.6 release of DragonFly, scheduled for March, will have version 4 of HAMMER. 2.4 has version 2. Upgrading from version 2 to 4 can happen in place, live, and only needs to happen once per volume, not per PFS. That’s about as easy as it gets. More details are available.
- The default sshd config has been updated; this shouldn’t affect your normal operations unless you’re using one of the mentioned options.
- Oliver Fromme linked to more discussion of SSD durability.
- Also, Matthew Dillon posted more notes and benchmark numbers for his swapcache work. There’s been some side benefits too. A man page for swapcache is now available.
- Aggelos Economopoulos’s libevtr has been added, for event tracing. He’s posted some additional notes on this work-in-progress.
- We now have /var/log/daemon, too.
- Notes on prepping for Google Summer of Code 2010 from the GSOC Discussion list; I don’t know if that link is readable for nonsubscribers.
- The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD is out at the end of this short month. Dru writes good books.
- Did you know FreeCiv (a Civilization clone, of sorts) is playable in a web browser? Goodbye free time! Details are available at my favoritest game site.
Phew.
Seen via email and Hubert Feyrer’s blog: There’s a NetBSD hackathon planned for February 19th through the 22nd. The meetup is via IRC. Since it’s NetBSD, it’ll include pkgsrc, and if it includes pkgsrc, it affects DragonFly. If you’re interested, show up – even being there to report on packages that compile or don’t (on DragonFly) would help.
Jan Lentfer has updated wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and while there’s already some postive reports, he’d like more testing in the wild. Give it a run if you’re already using the prior version.
I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:
- Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
- Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
- Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
- Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
- The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
- Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
- More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
- The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.
Matthew Dillon is setting up DragonFly to be able to use a fast disk (like a SSD) for disk cache, reducing the effect swap has on speed. This means very large amounts of data could be read into memory – greater than the available RAM in the system – without having the normal paging out problems that happen when memory is exhausted. It’ll work for any filesystem on the machine – HAMMER, UFS, or NFS. His inital notes have more. Other notes include details on the NFS benefits, and possibilities with SSDs. Wear-leveling may make SSDs last much longer.
Work has started, and there’s an update (with examples) that people can try, though it may destroy all your data at this point. Test results in that update show, if I’m reading it right, a better than doubling of speed on a repeated md5 test on a large file when using the new caching system. This should be a huge benefit.