Wide topic range, again.
Accidental topic this week: very, very old computers. Your comics link of the week: Cartozia Tales #1, with more added.  I subscribed to this series long ago, and it's a lot of fun.
Lots to read this week. Your unrelated link of the week: Snowpocalypse 2014.  I grew up there and now live not too far away.  That's really not that much snow for the area; it's just that it fell so quickly.
Google has a post up about the 10th anniversary of Summer of Code, with next year's version of the event getting some changes - an increase in the students allocated and in the student stipend, and more events.  I'm planning to apply for DragonFly, for 2014. Google is also doing the Code-In, for 13 to 17-year-old students, again.  DragonFly participated in the first year (the only BSD to do so), but sat out last year.  I'm not currently anticipating DragonFly being involved for 2013, cause of reasons.  (It's a lot of work!)
Google Code-In 2012 has been announced.  I'm not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year...  anyone want to step up?
Google's running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects.  DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done.  However, we need ideas, the more the better.  Please add whatever comes to mind.
I moved to DragonFly 2.10 over the past few days, and I tried out deduplication, to see what kind of results I would get.  The procedure is outlined below.  I'm using /home here as an example, just to reduce the amount of text pasted in. /pfs/@@-1:00004     966000640 566434576 399566064    59%    /home Move my various Hammer pseudo-file systems to version 5, which supports deduplication. # hammer version-upgrade /home 5 Issue a deduplication simulate command, to see what it guesses will be the savings: # hammer dedup-simulate /home Dedup-simulate /home: objspace 8000000000000000:0000 7fffffffffffffff:ffff pfs_id 4 Dedup-simulate /home succeeded Simulated dedup ratio = 1.22 That ratio turned out to be pretty accurate for the actual deduplication.  I didn't time it, unfortunately.  I don't know if the time taken is proportional to the amount of deduplication or the total volume of data, though I suspect the latter. # hammer dedup /home Dedup /home: objspace 8000000000000000:0000 7fffffffffffffff:ffff pfs_id 4 Dedup /home succeeded Dedup ratio = 1.22 462 GB referenced 378 GB allocated 14 MB skipped 6869 CRC collisions 0 SHA collisions 0 bigblock underflows The end result? /pfs/@@-1:00004     966000640 505887504 460113136    52%    /home That data space is shared across all file systems, and it's a 1TB disk, so it's 7%, or 70GB. I was hoping for more, but I don't have any obviously duplicated data (no local mail store, no on-disk backups), so perhaps this is normal. 70GB that I didn't have before is no bad thing, though. Incidentally, I was able to upgrade my installed software from pkgsrc-2009Q4 to pkgsrc-2011Q1 entirely using pkg_radd -u <pkgname>.  Remarkably quick and painless, though pkgin may have been able to do it even faster since it would pull from the same place.
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.
The winners of Google Code-In have been posted.  They win a trip to Google (remember, they are 13-18 years old) and an impressive item on their resume.  And yes, some of those names there worked on DragonFly projects.
Samuel J. Greear committed some more code that happened to come from DragonFly/Google Code-In projects.  There's a surprising large amount of code that came from those projects...
Samuel J. Greear has written a summary of DragonFly's experience with Google Code-In 2011, noting that the students tacked harder projects than expected, and relatively easy documentation projects were less popular than expected.  He has hard numbers on tasks done, too. I think this article holds the "number of hyphens in a title" record for this blog.
Another Google Code-In project arrives: libfsid.  It's used to get the volume label for a given file system.  (see man page)  It makes me happy to see more Google Code-In projects coming to fruition and getting committed - suggest more, if you have them!
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
Another piece of work by one of the fine students participating in Google Code-In is a new 2.8 installation screencast/video. Check it out at the following link: DragonFly BSD 2.8 Installation Screencast on YouTube If you have been following along but have not yet tried DragonFly, this should evidence how easy it is -- wait not a second longer!
The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there's new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects.  14 tasks are done, and there's 10 more in progress, out of... I think 50?  This is a good rate, considering there's more than a month left.