DragonFly BSD Digest

I’ve been traveling for a few days, so it’s time you break out the bullet points again in an effort to catch up.

Matthew Dillon posted a Hammer summary and warning on the 25th, along with another update today, mostly about mirroring and very large (terabyte!) files. Michael Neumann is also adding to Hammer functionality.

He also did some initial porting work on netgraph from FreeBSD, though there’s some objections. The purpose is to make updating certain utilites easier.

This minor update to ATA support leads to a page with some interesting details about how ATA works.

FreeBSDNews.net has set up a Google calendar for FreeBSD events, though I daresay many of the events will have multiple BSDs represented.

You know how I always post about roguelike games here? The ultimate form of the roguelike has been announced.

Dru Lavigne says “Grs!“.  A bonus point to whomever figures out that reference…

Gergo Szakal asked some questions on usage scenarios for Hammer; Matt Dillon answered the questions with enough details that I’m linking to it.

Matthew Dillon’s posted another Hammer update, this one looking forward to pseudo file systems and mirroring, and perhaps a bit farther.

Here’s some BSD and Linux comparisons that happened to come up recently:

First, NetBSD is moving to a 2-clause BSD license. Hubert Feyrer has mention of this, along with a small graph contrasting the word count of the GPL vs. the BSD license used in NetBSD, over time.

KernelTrap has a post up about a position statement from the Linux Foundation that “urge[s] vendors to adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source kernel code.” Compare that to the OpenBSD position on binary blobs.

The June issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Security being this month’s theme. There’s an article that covers a presentation on my favorite topic, “Building Technical Communities“. The Coverity Report is also interesting as it talks about the Coverity open source analysis and what the parts mean. And it has infoporn, in the form of graphs!

Mayur Bhosle has added a short writeup to the wiki on how to boot a modified DragonFly kernel in VMWare. Appropriate, given his Summer of Code project. There’s always vkernels, too.

More conversations about Hammer capabilites has been going on, on the kernel@ mailing lists, including where Matthew Dillon describes where Hammer’s mirroring concept came from, and the possibilities of growing and shrinking filesystems. (Read to the end.) Also, he’s put up a preliminary paper describing Hammer – what it does, how to use it, and future plans. There’s a section on porting for those who might be interested.

KernelTrap’s still tracking progress, too.

(Apparently Hammer does not need to be in all caps as I’ve been writing it, going by the paper.)

Aggelos Economopoulos has updated his NetMP page on the wiki with a link to recent instructions on testing his changes. For those who haven’t noticed, he’s working on removal of the Big Giant Lock from DragonFly’s networking code.

I have a number of links to dump:

Dru Lavigne has found that Verio is offering BSD hosting (specifically, FreeBSD). She’s also got her own recent linkpile which mentions this odd thing, plus a Federico Biancuzzi BSD interview I think I missed.

KernelTrap has a DragonFly B-Tree summary similar to mine, plus a writeup on POHMELFS benchmark, that filesystem being mentioned on this site a few days back.

“FreeBSD – the unknown Giant” has changed domains to www.freebsdnews.net.

If you’ve been wanting to really tax the heck out of your filesystem – whether or not it’s HAMMER – here’s a good way to do so.

On a similar tangent, Dimitri Nikulin and Aggelos Economopoulos mentioned several other filesystem projects that may be fun to read about: POHMELFS, Btrfs, and CRFS.

KernelTrap has a summary up of recent HAMMER development, though if you’ve been reading here, it’ll already be familiar in a more truncated format.

Also! There’s a June 13th HAMMER update From Matthew Dillon, just to continue the trend.  Recompile and re-newfs, as usual.

Following some of the article tags at KernelTrap creates an interesting topic-specific DragonFly history, incidentally.

BSDTalk has a 12 minute interview with Michael W. Lucas, author of a number of BSD books and the Big Scary Daemons column at OnLAMP.  His writing is excellent.

“Building OpenSolaris Communities“, found on an OpenSolaris blog, is a generally excellent guide on how to build an open-source community. It’s based around OpenSolaris, which isn’t a surprise, but almost everything discussed applies equally well to DragonFly or other projects without a corporate source. (via… I lost track, sorry!)

Aggelos Economopoulos, who is working on making the network stack multiprocessor safe, has a page up on the DragonFly wiki describing his work. Normally I’d link to his recent conversations about this on the kernel@ mailing list, but he’s already done a nice job describing/linking it on the wiki.