DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 237 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2011/04/102011/04/09

Lazy Reading for 2011/04/13

Get out your wallet! I encourage purchasing here.

You should buy a SSD. Not necessarily news to you, but that article does a good job of summarizing why.
On the other hand, SSD prices are already on their way up/availability is way down. Japan’s disasters are having a ripple effect through the high-tech supply chain. Either buy immediately or get ready to wait for a while…
Introduction to Architecting Systems for Scale – you either don’t care, or find scaling questions immediately engaging. I am one of the latter, so here’s the link.
I’ve been watching pkgsrc-changes@netbsd.org for a little while. One thing I’ve discovered: there’s a lot of updates going on! Another thing that’s nice to see: DragonFly updates, including ones that help with our move to gcc 4.4.
Aw, no more Kermit. (via) Not that I have a use for it at this point, but still: aww. I bet in about 10 years I’ll say the same thing about… gopher? Remember that? It’s not even supported in Firefox 4 now, which kinda makes me feel sad. And old.
Server plans: Facebook vs. Google. (warning: Facebook article is somewhat giddy.)
The infinite hard drive. (via I lost it, sorry)

Here’s an extra little thing: next time you’re dealing with dusty computer equipment, remember this picture:

That is what happens to an exposed RJ45 port after a few years in a salt mine (my employer). This was inside an enclosed, mostly-sealed structure, too.

2011/04/09

One extra thing: OpenSSH

Peter Avalos squeezed in one more thing before the DragonFly2.10 branch: an update of OpenSSH to version 5.8-p1. This is mostly a security fix upgrade to 5.7 – see the OpenSSH release notes for details.

2011/04/09

Thoughts about RAID1

There’s been plenty of discussion about Summer of Code projects on the mailing lists. One conversation about “Implementing a mirror target for the device mapper” led to a longer description from Venkatesh Srinivas about mirroring and how he’s looked at implementation.

2011/04/08

Next release April 23rd

Branch tomorrow, release in 2 weeks. There’s a ton of new features for 2.10, so this will be a fun release. I’m trying to get pkgsrc-2011Q1 packages built for 2.10 ahead of time, too.

2011/04/07

Our newest committer: John Marino

Welcome John Marino, who has been working on some rather difficult updates for gcc and other toolchain items.

2011/04/07

April OSBR: Collectives

The Open Source Business Resource issue for April is out, themed on Collectives. A lot of it covers the Keystone Off the Shelf (KOTS) project, which is a collection of open source software designed to work as a starting package for a technology business. Read the first article for more details.

2011/04/06

Swapcache updates, long-term status

Matthew Dillon made some changes to swapcache(8). Swapcache is now able to cache a lot more data, and the result is that general disk performance for _all_ disks is accelerated by an included SSD using swapcache. Performance previously restricted to all-SSD systems or serious RAID setups is now possible with much less investment.

In addition to that, the long-term wear on the SSD appears to be less of a problem than expected.

2011/04/06

Some Summer of Code projects

If you’d like to read some of the Summer of Code student proposals for DragonFly, there’s a number of them available. I haven’t found a way to get a comprehensive list without being logged in, yet.

2011/04/05

pkgsrc-2011Q1 details

I already noted that the quarterly release is out, but the pkgsrc-2011Q1 release announcement is available now. There’s good reasons to link to it – the list of updated packages, new packages, and credits for the work people have been doing. Here’s the part I really want to pick out:

We’re aiming to make this the last branch to support non-DESTDIR packages. We have almost finished the transition to DESTDIR installation, where a staging directory is used to make a binary package, which is then managed by the pkg_install tools.

The reason I’m highlighting this is: it’s good news! One of the long-term complaints with pkgsrc is that the upgrade process is painful. If you try to build an upgrade and the build processfails after uninstalling the existing package, not only are you not getting the upgrade, but you’ve lost the existing package. Binary packages for download helps with this (and generally is faster), but only so many packages can be built separately and made available for download.

Building a package separately and then installing from there removes these issues. No binary redistribution issues, actual downtime is minimal, and the package is known to work when an upgrade happens. This removes most of the problems I’ve heard raised about pkgsrc over the years.

2011/04/05

GCC 4.4.5 now

Sascha Wildner has moved gcc in DragonFly to a slightly newer version: 4.4.5. It mostly seems to make things easier to compile, going by the reports I’ve heard. This is the version that will be in DragonFly 2.10.

2011/04/04

BSD Magazine for April out

The April issue of BSD Magazine is out! It’s a very full issue, including another news roundup by yours truly.

2011/04/04

pkgsrc-2011Q1 tagged

It’s tagged, though there’s no release announcement yet. Working on building binaries starting tonight…

2011/04/04

Marvell looks over our shoulder

It’s Dragonfly, and it sounds very similar to swapcache(8). Coincidence? Maybe. (via bodie on EFNet #dragonfly IRC)

2011/04/032011/04/03

Lazy Reading for 2011/04/03

Getting into the swing of this link collection thing…

The first paragraph of this things magazine post is about the “lingering memory of the space of ancient video games.” It’s good; follow the links to read. It also mentions the excellent This Gaming Life book, which is on the shelf to the right of me as I type, and can be read in full online. (though it’s worth buying.)
This made me laugh.
How to kill your online community. Good guidelines for how to (not) act.
This week’s “Only the Internet could produce this”: Einstein vs. Hawking, the rap battle.
pcc is now at version 1.0.
Anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar? I’m sick of mine.

2011/04/022011/04/02

Double buffering in Hammer usually useful

Enabling the vfs.hammer.double_buffer=1 sysctl will greatly improve Hammer performance when you’ve exceeded your memory cache (at a possible slight penalty when you have not) and also speed things up when using live deduplication.

Update: Venkatesh Srinivas says:

“double_buffer makes sense when: 1) you want all CRCs to be checked on reads. 2) you’re running live dedup and care about dedup performance rather than say read-heavy performance; 3) you have swapcache but are often running into the vnode limit in what you can cache.”

So, not always useful.

2011/04/02

binutils, Hammer updates

Sascha Wildner has updated the default version of binutils in DragonFly from 2.17 to 2.21. You’ll want to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade, if you’re running DragonFly 2.9.

Also, Matthew Dillon has made version 6 the default version of Hammer in DragonFly 2.9. Version 6 has improved handling of directory names in some circumstances. Just don’t ask me which, cause I lost track. It’s been a hard day!

2011/04/01

Pkgsrc packages possibly pruned

There’s a number of pkgsrc packages that have a combination of security vulnerabilites and lack of updates for more than a year which is placing them on the chopping block. (Follow the discussion to see which ones make it off the list.) The removals will happen after the next branch, pkgsrc-2011Q1, which is itself due in two days.

2011/03/302011/03/29

Virtual disk simplification

Chris Turner is looking to implement something similar to OpenBSD’s mount_vnd(8) operation, where virtual disks can be mounted at boot. He talks about some of the work and ideas at length. If you don’t feel like reading about it, you can instead mess with it; he has a tarball of the current state of his work linked in his message.

2011/03/302011/03/29

Fairq enhancements

If you’re using pf to control how your bandwidth is used, you may want to look at the recent fairq updates from Matthew Dillon. It should perform better now in situations where one traffic group is saturating its available bandwidth. Here’s a handy link that explains this sort of problem, yoinked from IRC.

2011/03/292011/03/30

Refixing mptable problems

If you’re running the bleeding edge version of DragonFly, because Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent work makes it possible to boot systems that were previously bootable, you may need this ~~sysctl trick~~ loader tunable in loader.conf:

debug.acpi.enabled="pci pci_link"

How will you know that you need it? The system will run strangely slow. The command enables ACPI interrupt routing, which corrects for mptable problems.