DragonFly – Page 134 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/02/19

Dear lazyweb: monitoring software needed

Since I have several machines repeatedly building all of pkgsrc now, I want to monitor RAM, disk I/O, CPU, and the like, and keep historical records. I’ve seen this done with cacti and snmp, and sort of done with nagios.

There must be easier/prettier choices out there. Any suggestions?

2010/02/19

Dragonfly and BSD but not this

It’s that Opera thing again. “Sigh“.

2010/02/19

IGD support added

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.

2010/02/19

Binary package updates

I’ve been working toward continuous builds of pkgsrc, so that there’s always up-to-date pkgsrc binaries available. I’ve been posting notes about it too, which I will hopefully be able to automate soon. For example, Firefox 3.5.8, the most recent version, is already available.

2010/02/18

alc(4) driver added

Samuel J. Greear and Matthew Dillon have ported the alc(4) driver, for wired Ethernet. This supports the “Atheros AR8131 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers and Atheros AR8132 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controllers”.

2010/02/18

Google Summer of Code presentation templates

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.

2010/02/162010/02/18

Messylaneous for 2010/02/16

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.

2010/02/162010/02/16

Cheap SSD at Newegg, today

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.

2010/02/15

Bigger /boot

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.

2010/02/15

BPF problem fixed

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.

2010/02/15

Disklabel goes 64

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.

2010/02/14

New committer: Constantine A. Murenin

Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer: Constantine A. Murenin. He’s responsible for the sensors framework, and is already busy.

2010/02/14

tmpfs added

Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work has been added, with some further changes. There’s a skeletal man page to look at.

2010/02/132010/02/13

HAMMER config details

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…

2010/02/11

Bizarre boot issue

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.

2010/02/11

NFS now defaults to readdirplus

NFS on DragonFly now defaults to readdirplus mounts, which improves directory read speeds. Testing for speed and compatibility is advised.

2010/02/09

Outage Wednesday

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.

2010/02/082010/02/08

A week’s worth of posts for you

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.

2010/02/06

Hackathon also for pkgsrc, Feb 19-22

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.

2010/02/05

New wpa_supplicant, hostapd to test

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.