Something new and odd: A port of the Hammer (1) filesystem into Go, for go-fuse. As the author has said, it’s more for the practice of learning Go and Hammer than for producing anything useful. Still, an interesting way to learn.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
Michael W. Lucas auctioned off his first copy of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition some time ago, with the proceeds going to the OpenBSD Foundation. It was to be signed by OpenBSD developers – which is neat enough, but apparently it was annotated by the developers, too.
Apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has been improving DragonFly’s route table performance under extremely heavy load. (e.g. run efficiently; don’t die) I don’t have a definitive commit message to point at, but looking at his recent commits are a good start.
Encryption seems to be the accidental theme tonight. A question about Hammer 2 and encryption prompted this list of possible solutions from Matthew Dillon. Hammer 2 is still months out, so these features both require time and someone interesting in doing them – though they sound quite possible.
Still not sure if I should be writing Hammer or HAMMER.
If you were wanting to encrypt your /home directory, Pierre Abbat has written up the explicit steps he took to do that very thing.
Week 3 is underway, and the students are starting to get into the meat of their projects:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
The pkgsrc-2013Q2 branch has been out for some days, but the official release announcement has now been published, with details on the number of ports. You should be able to pull it down from dragonflybsd.org via git, by the way.
A U.S. holiday and very warm weather has made this a less intense week. At least for links.
- Someone help. A problem I never anticipated. (via)
- Git Cheat Sheet. This one’s for printing. (via)
- Real Life Tron on an Apple ][gs. (via)
- Neocities, an excellent idea. Follow the suggested links. (via)
- Mandelbulber, a cross between Electric Sheep and Xaos. (via I forget)
- A drawing of the Internet (ARPANet) in 1977. The whole thing. (via)
- Bunnie Huang’s making an open laptop. Won’t be cheap or easy, but it’s still neat.
- Vim 7.4a hits beta.
Your unrelated link of the week: A new Cyriak-animated video, this time for the band Bloc Party.
The official announcement has gone out. You should be able to pull pkgsrc-2013Q2 via git from dragonflybsd.org within the next 24 hours.
While these aren’t his BSD books, Michael W. Lucas has an interesting post up about the sales on his two recent books, SSH Mastery and DNSSEC Mastery. I’m always interested in seeing how self-publishing models work, whether it’s software or books or music. He points out that the point of his DNSSEC book is to see if a very difficult subject can be covered in a book like that – which it is. There’s very few published books that go that in-depth.
(I’m hoping for a whole “Mastery” series covering topics other writers don’t, especially in a BSD-friendly way.)
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their second week reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
There’s a lot of progress for the second week, which is wonderful!
If you have an Emulex BladeEngine 2 or 3, or an Emulex Lancer, it should work in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner’s recent commit. Emulex has 10Gb network cards, in case you were like me and not familiar with the name.
(You thought I was going to type “Sepherosa Ziehau”, didn’t you?)
Some of the links this week go pretty in-depth. Enjoy!
- This short story from 1954 might serve as a reason to avoid single system image computing… (via Sascha Wildner)
- Vim and Ctags tips and tricks. (via)
- Psygnosis game box designs. Nostalgia for some, neat art for anyone else. (via)
- 50 years of ASCII, and here’s the table it comes from. Some other neat links there, too. (via)
- Richard Feynman and The Connection Machine. If you like stories about Feynman, who was a very interesting person, you may want to read Feynman, the comic book. I met the writer, Jim Ottaviani, years ago, and he was very energetic about both science and comics. Look up his other work if that sounds interesting – which it should. Here’s a sample from the Feynman book. (via)
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Back to the Future: Preserving the History of Video Games. This is right around the corner from me. The game museum is as neat as it sounds (yes, they have games out to play), but the article doesn’t mention that it’s attached to a fantastic and huge kid’s museum.
- Building a Cray at home. Similar to this previously-linked idea. (via)
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Candy Box and A Dark Room. Both are text-only games, but they use HTML5 for animation. They start minimal, and build up – be patient; there’s a lot of gameplay in there. These minimal games fascinate me. It’s like reading a book, where it goes from just static text to an entire world being built. (somewhat via)
Your bonus unrelated comics link of the week: Jack Kirby double-page spreads. It’s not an exaggeration to say this artwork crackles. (via I forget)
FreeBSD ports, and therefore Dragonfly dports, will drop KDE 3.5 items sometime very soon. It’s possible to continue to build them in dports, but it’s extra work. If you need them, volunteer, because otherwise they will be dropped. (An idea I fully support.)
Earlier this week, Daniel Flores posted the first-week report on his Google Summer of Code project, file compression in Hammer. He mentioned that the LZ4 algorithm he is using seems to have the best performance with repeating text data, as in logfiles. I asked for numbers, and he provided them. The important data in the results is the total compression column. It shows how many 64k blocks were able to be compressed, with that type of data.
If you have a mps(4) device (LSI Fusion-MPT 2 SAS disk controller), you may be interested in Matthew Dillon’s large commit of bugfixes from FreeBSD. Specifically, he notes that the drive gets ‘overtagged’, and performance can be greatly improved by reducing the number of tags used.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, Netperf will now calculate Jain’s fairness index. That is a formula that is both interesting and unfamiliar to me. Not that I understand it, of course – it’s just because it has a neat name.
It looks like OpenJDK7 works in pkgsrc for DragonFly, thanks to Ryo ONODERA, and I think it’s working in dports too.
Because Sepherosa Ziehau changed mbstat, anyone on bleeding-edge DragonFly will need to rebuild world, or else netstat will become confused.