Avalon, the machine that works as the master mirror site for DragonFly, and also as git.dragonflybsd.org, is being moved. Binary package downloads and source updates won’t work in the meantime. If you can’t wait for the system to come back, change the settings for pkg_radd or in /usr/Makefile to point at a different host.
Sascha Wildner continues the driver update streak, bringing in the updated FreeBSD version of the aac(4) driver. This adds support for 40+ Adaptec AdvancedRAID cards – the aac(4) man page has a very long list.
A Phoronix test of DragonFly’s Hammer filesystem turned up, via Siju George. It’s not really a benchmark as much as it is a speed test, and it’s not a realistic comparison, but it’s interesting to see numbers.
They need a graph that shows how much historical data can be recovered by each file system, or how long fsck takes after a crash.
Update: Matthew Dillon points out the many ways these tests are wrong.
The burncd command has been removed; it hasn’t been working for some time. The sysutils/cdrtools utility cdrecord is the viable alternative. cdrecord is a pkgsrc application, but it comes on the DragonFly install CD/DVD/image/whatnot.
Ilya Dryomov wrote out some more details about his deduplication work, with some notes on what he plans next for this feature.
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is titled “The Business of Open Source”. The first article, titled “Cost Optimization Through Open Source Software“, explains why iXSystems is all BSD, all the time. There’s also an eye-opening breakdown of the dramatic cost savings from going with open-source rather than Windows.
Apparently the surplus money from the recent NYCBSDCon is going to each of the BSD projects. Great news! Now, what to do with it…
Ilya Dryomov has added live deduplication, or as he titles it, “efficient cp”. It’s experimental and turned on with a sysctl, so approach with caution.
Here’s a nice collection of post-installation notes on DragonFly. They’re part of a larger UNIX note collection. I may have linked to it before; I don’t remember. This note’s new, though.
Xerox Network Services is gone from DragonFly. Does anyone, anywhere, use this protocol? Ironically, I don’t recall this even being visible on the Xerox hardware products I have at work.
The end of year holidays intruded, so I haven’t had one of these for more than a week. Sorry! Merry Christmas, happy new year, etc.
- Whenever I am tempted to throw family pictures or something similar online in a ‘cloud’ service, I will reread this Jason Scott essay on the ‘Yahoo!locaust’ and come to my senses. (via)
- There’s a trade-off between size and price for SSDs. Past a certain point, any drive is generally ‘big enough’, and under a certain price, the cost doesn’t matter. We’re reaching the magic point where those two trends cross, as with this OCX Vertex 2 SSD drive, 60G in size and only $120 at Newegg. There’s lots of post-Christmas sales going on.
- How soon will SSD drives become normal and platter drives the anachronism, like single-core processors are today? It took less than 5 years for CPUs, I think… No link for this idea; this is just me theorizing.
- Tomas Bodzar pointed out this article about 1,000 core CPUs, which I dub ‘kilocore’. He also linked to these logical domain/logical partition articles on Wikipedia.
- In this day and age, a website that supports a limited number of browsers and platforms seems anachronistic. Still happens, though. (via)
- This is neat: an online, persistent space game with exploration and combat. Not EVE, but Lacuna Expanse, playable via web browser. There’s lots of browser games out there, but here’s the interesting part: the game even has a fully exposed API.
Aleksey Cheusov is putting together a package manager for pkgsrc, called nih. (For “Not Invented Here”). It’s binary-only at this point, so you’d need to run distbb or pbulk to generate packages, or download from avalon.dragonflybsd.org.
MirBSD is apparently also interested in pkgsrc as an alternative to the exclusive-to-MirBSD Mirports. The more the merrier, I say.
Tim Bisson put together support for the RealTek 8168E network card, under the re(4) driver. It’s in DragonFly now.
Another bus bites the dust: EISA is no more on DragonFly. I don’t know if there’s even any system that DragonFly could boot on and would use this. Still, remove your hats and enjoy a moment of silence.
The planned freeze is underway; so pkgsrc-2010Q4 should arrive soon. How soon? January 1st, if it’s by the traditional schedule.
Apparently there’s a lot of DragonFly people going to the 27th Chaos Communication Congress. Of course, I don’t know if there’s any tickets left at this point.
Matthew Dillon fixed a rare and difficult-to-find bug on x86-64 Dragonfly. This means much more of the system can be run ‘MPSAFE’, or without the Giant Lock. Watch for this soon if you’re running 2.9.