DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 230 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2011/07/232012/01/21

Practical Packet Analysis: a review

Background: You may remember some time ago, I posted a review of Michael Lucas’s Network Flow Analysis. He’s written several BSD books and so I figured it was worth reading further, knowing that this network-specific book would be BSD-friendly. Also, he made it easier by sending me a copy.

No Starch Press, the company that published all the books linked in the previous paragraph, asked if I’d read/review another book from them. This would be Practical Packet Analysis, 2nd edition. (Review continues after the break…)

Continue reading “Practical Packet Analysis: a review”

2011/07/222011/07/20

Deduplication real world results

I’ve posted about my own results with Hammer deduplication here before, but Siju George put together results from his workplace using actual files in production. He recovered 138G from a 1T disk, and recovered 20% of space from another disk. Not bad for something that’s nearly automatic, and completely free.

2011/07/222011/07/19

2011Q2 binary builds finishing up

The builds of pkgsrc-2011Q2 are finishing up, so we have/will have binaries to download, for those who don’t want to build from source. The uploads should be complete by now for everything except maybe 2.11/x86_64. You’ll have to change $PKG_PATH to point at the new directories for now, though. There’s also some build reports to look at.

2011/07/212011/07/18

clang and pkgsrc bulk builds

I spied a bulk build of pkgsrc using clang. It’s interesting to see the results… It’s on NetBSD, but it should be possible to try the same thing with CCVER on DragonFly. Any takers?

2011/07/212011/07/20

Starve reads or starve writes?

Remember the benchmark tests I linked a few days ago? There’s been ongoing discussion about them, and a recent comment from Matthew Dillon sums it up pretty well: the benchmarks differ depending on whether you favor reads, or favor writes.

2011/07/202011/07/18

More Broadcom support

Thanks to Michael Neumann, there’s more supported Broadcom network card chipsets. There’s some wierdness in setup, though, so look at his commit message.

2011/07/202011/07/20

BSD-Day Argentina: call for papers

BSDday Argentina 2011 is happening the 4th and 5th of November, in Buenos Aires City, Argentina. The Call for Papers is out, if you’d like to contribute.

2011/07/192011/07/17

Tim and TRIM

Tim Bisson has another status report on supporting TRIM in DragonFly. It supports UFS and Hammer slices, and trimming swap too. I’m not sure what else could be done; that sounds pretty complete to me… In any case, if you have a SSD, his code is available to try right now.

2011/07/192011/07/17

Smartphone driver

If you happen to use a LG P-500 smartphone to get online via USB, as ‘Romick’ does, he’s got a patch that makes that device work under DragonFly. (Sorry, the original users@ email seems to have gone missing.)

2011/07/182011/07/17

CCC Camp for all

About a month from now (August 10-14), the CCC Camp is being held outside Berlin. Bring a tent and (I assume) something capable of getting a wireless connection. It only happens every 4 years, so jump on it now. There will be at least one DragonFly-using person there – Matthias Schmidt is going.

2011/07/182011/07/17

Binutils updated

John Marino has made binutils 2.21.1 the default binutils in DragonFly, and gprof is now built but not in the default path.

2011/07/172011/07/16

Lazy Reading for 2011/07/17

Man, it’s like the whole Internet decided to take a nap lately. Warm weather in the northern hemisphere does that.

The Hidden Damage From Waste Data (And How To Deal With It) (via) My answer is more RAMdisks. That’s always my answer for everything, though.
A replacement for ALTQ.
Some developer who doesn’t use BSD says it’s not worthwhile. (via) Rather than argue, I’ll just note that the article was linked as “Developer says BSD not worth it” rather than “Interview with man who did PulseAudio” or “What’s happening with systemd”. That may show what people actually care about. Also, see this comment.

2011/07/162011/07/16

Disk encryption updates

Alex Hornung has made a pile of changes for disk encryption, including adding libdm, a “simple BSD-licensed libdevmapper“,and adding tcplay, a 100% compatible implementation of TrueCrypt. This should make you very happy if you like running from an encrypted disk.

Update: Alex has written an in-depth explanation of this work. It’s a huge change!

Update update: Hey, it’s showing on Hacker News too!

2011/07/15

Summer of Code: midterm passes

All 6 Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly have reached the midterm, and passed!

2011/07/14

More benchmarks, graphs

Francois Tigeot has repeated his benchmarking, this time changing out the CPU instead of the operating system. There’s still more graphs, yay!

2011/07/14

Vkernel checkpoint status

Irina Pre?a has posted a nice summary of the Google Summer of Code project “Checkpointing vkernels.”

2011/07/13

Summer of Code midterms due

If you are a Summer of Code student or mentor, make sure you’ve filled out your midterm survey. Without it, your project fails – and they are due for everyone in roughly the next 24 hours!

2011/07/12

Summer of Code Doc Camp

One of the perpetual questions about Summer of Code is “Why can’t there be documentation projects?”, since most open source projects need docs as badly as code. There’s various reasons that I’m too lazy to research and type out, I’m sure, but Google is sponsoring a “Doc Camp“, in October. You don’t have to be in Summer of Code; you just have to be willing to spend the 17th through the 25th writing documentation. Google pays for room and board, and you can apply for transportation cost coverage. A classy idea, all around. Someone participate and report back!

2011/07/112011/07/20

Blogbench and Areca RAID tests

Francois Tigeot tested a system under both FreeBSD and DragonFly using various RAID setups with arcmsr(4) and blogbench. Hooray for graphs! Like any good benchmark, it quickly went to discussion of how the test was conducted and how the various runs differ. (Follow the thread.)

2011/07/09

Summer of Code halfway point

The Google Summer of Code midterms are coming up, which generally means students get graded on a pass/fail basis for their work so far, and both mentors and students fill out surveys. What’s this mean? It means we’re halfway through six projects!