bsdtalk202 - DragonFlyBSD 2.8 with Matthew Dillon

Also Available via Phone: +1 (210) 957-5481

This is an interview from day 2 of MeetBSD California.  He interviews Matthew Dillon about the recent Dragonfly BSD 2.8 release.

New Features include:

• Linux LVM (most of it)
• NetBSD DM ( Disk Manager / Storage Manager) which includes striping and crypto
• GUI release image working for this release
• A lot of stability work.
• A lot of Multi-Processor improvements
• Simplified the kernel framework to use kqueue everywhere
• Hammer Filesystem is doing well.
• swap cache improvements.

A GSoc project for dedupe for hammer is going into the code this week.
Software crypto was only using a single CPU, but in this release they did a bunch of work on the opencrypto in the kernel to make it Multi-Processor aware.

Crypto options for the installer are going into the codebase shortly.  The entire Hammer partition will be able to be encrypted.  Some VM adjustments after the release fix a heavily loaded machine working in low memory.  They just went it to the code.

Clustered Single Instance System
This is still a goal but they have backed off the SSI system for now. What they are doing is the clustered, multi-master filesystem and cache coherency.  This is a much more doable goal.  The focus recently has been on Multi-Processor work.  They are almost done removing the Giant Lock.  Nearly the entire backend is MP safe.  All the network stack, the entire IO path is MP safe through Hammer.  The front end is using token locks.  About half of them are actually still getting locks.  

The removal of the locks from the back end has improved performance a lot.  The system is no longer single threaded.

NFS

They fixed a lot of issues with NFS.  The RPCs are now asynchronous.  The OS now dedicates 2 kernel threads.  One for reading and one for writing.  Performance has been very good.

Hammer

They now have a catastrophic recovery tool.  It can't recover in place, but it can restore a hammer drive to another disk.  It requires almost no knowledge of the disk topography, but it handles it all automatically.  This utility was written because a user needed to recover a disk that had read errors and there were no backups.   A couple of the errors were right in the middle of the Hammer filesystem. An fsck tool was just impossible for Hammer, but a recovery tool was very simple.  It was written in just a couple of days.  The user was able to recover 99% of his files.

Swapcache

A lot of people don't understand how this works and how important it is.  It works with a single regular harddrive and a 20G SSD drive.  Even a small SSD creates major improvements to the original disk.

bsdtalk200 - The mg text editor with Kjell Wooding

Also Available via Phone: +1 (210) 957-5481

Kjell Wooding is the maintainer of the mg text editor.  Its a lightweight emacs text editor.  Normally you use emacs in small environments.  This solves that problem.  The mg editor is in the public domain and is now in the base system of OpenBSD.

Emacs is a lisp interpreter that just happens to have a text editor attached to it.  The mg editor is just an editor and won't have any extra bloat in it.  There really aren't any extras, its just a text editor.

The mg editor is written in C and its very tiny in terms of source code.  There have been lots of people who have ported it to many places.  Its been around a long time, maybe since 1986.

Kjell began running a computer security company and just happened to live in the same town as Theo DeRaadt.  It didn't take long to get involved in OpenBSD and is still an OpenBSD developer and is involved with the OpenBSD Foundation.

The latest source code for mg is really only available in OpenBSD.  There are a lot of todo's in the source code, but most of it is just maintenance.

As an April fools joke, he compiled in a vi mode, which to everyones surprise compiled and worked for many things.

Theo mode spits out quotes from Theo and is the only code not in the public domain.

All the modes in the code are documented now and the documentation is probably bigger than the source code.

bsdtalk199 - PC-Sysinstall with John Hixson

Also Available via Phone: +1 (210) 957-5481

John Hixson has been hacking on the PC Sysinstall from PC-BSD to make it work on FreeBSD.  He has also been working on a curses based front end to it for both PC-BSD and FreeBSD.  The new changes for this front end work will allow any front end to work with the PC Sysinstall backend.  He is also working on implementing PC Sysinstall into FreeNAS.

FreeBSD Sysinstall works as an admin tool, but PC Sysinstall isn't quite ready to be used as a sysadmin tool to reconfigure a system.  However, support for that is in the plans.  There are also plans for creating scripted install support for installing on an identical setup on multiple machines and netbooting.

PC Sysinstall handles many more disk setups during install than the traditional FreeBSD sysinstall.  It also supports installs over FTP.

ISO image installers are not available yet, but should be soon.

You can currently install FreeBSD using the graphical installer from PC Sysinstall.

FreeBSD's sysinstall is pretty dated and ugly.  There has been a lot of features added to FreeBSD that aren't supported by sysinstall.  So this new installer is long over due for FreeBSD.