Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.
Dylan Reinhold has contributed a HOWTO document on setting up swapcache. Thanks, Dylan!
YONETANI Tomokazu pointed out something that could be useful in the future: when you start getting drive errors, before you throw it out, try lowering the speed. Maybe it’s a cable problem, if you’re lucky.
Not the music, but the setting. The May issue of BSD Magazine is out, though there isn’t a page for it on the website yet. Instead, I’ll point at the PDF.
(I posted about the last issue twice, didn’t I? Oops.)
As described on the kernel@ mailing list, there’s several code bounties out now, formed in part from GSoC projects that didn’t get a slot. All of them have money waiting behind them. (I’d sure like to see better interrupt routing.)
As McLone points out, the filesystem comparison page on Wikipedia is missing some Hammer details. Anyone want to fill in the pertinent numbers?
Paul Onyschuk went and created a very neat and very long Gource movie using one of the oldest codebases out there: NetBSD. It’s available on Vimeo. His original data is available if anyone wants to try something similar.
A brief history of fsck (via) Is “A Brief History of X” a meme all by itself? Searching on it gave me this book of course, but also this interesting article about Internet history.
I’ve been restraining myself from a Facebook rant (other than deleting my Facebook account), as there’s plenty of people complaining about Facebook out there. This description, however, is as good a reason as anything for why there’s better choices.
Speaking of getting away from Facebook and fsck, apparently a “dirty Unix joke” made it into a New York Times photo about Facebook alternatives. (via)
That was my best segue ever.
Totally unrelated now: “Clicky” keyboards, and various links about them. (via) There’s at least a few person who’s going to read those links and get excited based on a mix of nostalgia and utility.
I’m removing the links for the old (DragonFly 2.3 and older) pkg_radd paths on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. If you have one of those older systems, you can update one line in pkg_radd if it’s useful to you.
Sevan Janiyan passed along a note: there’s a *BSD meetup at the Barrowboy and Banker pub
by London Bridge, in London, the 27th of May. I’d love to attend, both because it’s BSD and because it’s a pub. That pesky Atlantic gets in the way.
FOSSLC has videos of the presentations from the recent BSDCan. (via) I’m listening to Will Backman’s keynote right now about the BSD community based on his BSDTalk work.
Update: Dru has a list of videos and pictures.
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on idle page zeroing; his work has been committed, and if enabled, should contribute to a teeny speedup. What’s it do? It gets memory ready for use when the CPU is not otherwise busy, so that less time is needed to allocate that memory. It looks like there’s more work on the way, too.
The version of pf in DragonFly is somewhat long in the tooth, but Jan Lentfer’s volunteered himself for the herculanean job of updating it. Go, Jan! Let’s hope this large task is more Nemean than Augean.
Marc G. Fournier posted some statistics gathered from his BSDStats service. It’s possible to activate this right now on DragonFly. Just put
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
in /etc/rc.conf. For details, there’s the man page.
A new issue of BSD Magazine is out – this issue’s theme is “Embedded BSD“.
Have I managed to forget all this time to add Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Events Twitter feed to my link list on the Digest? Yes, I did – fixed.
If you have a Hammer filesystem, and you want to roll the entire thing back to a previous snapshot – all files, everywhere – it can be accomplished with one command.
Did you know… ipfw/natd appears to be broken in DragonFly 2.6? Using pf is a better choice, at least, but I found it out the hard way.
Videos of the presentations at AsiaBSDCon 2010 are up; FreeBSD – The Unknown Giant has a number of them. Constantine A. Murenin’s Quiet Computing presentation is interesting, especially because it runs on DragonFly.