It's that time of the year again - time for the biggest, bestest gathering of BSD geeks from around the world - BSDCan 2013. It was great to see old friends and new faces, exchange ideas and talk about the bright future.
Author Archives: The arrow of time
FreeNAS vs NAS4free
I've (finally) tried both FreeNAS and NAS4free and I'd like to share some thoughts and experiences. Both of these are "NAS-in-a-box" products intended to be installed on computers with a large number of drives, which they will export to the world in a variety of protocols. Both are based on FreeBSD, both fully support ZFS and they even share a common history.
The tl;dr of this post would be something like "yes, they are similar enough to be interchangable, BUT...", as I actually cannot give a more specific advice. Read on for why.
FreeBSD 10 news
There's been a lot of maturing of technology for FreeBSD 10 - lots of new features which make this release the most exciting one in years. Here are some of my personal highlights.
Parallella on Kickstarter
Kickstarter is a great thing - it allows projects which limited appeal to be succesfully financed, which helps them succeed. One such project is the Parallela. It is basically an ARM-based highly-NUMA computer with 16-64 cores which can be used both to teach parallel programming and actually do some useful work with very little electrical power. The numbers cited as on the on the order of 45 GFLOPS/watt for the maximum configuration. As the Kickstarter deadline is approaching, I think it is a good time to use this opportunity to call on all enthusiasts to help fund this cool project!
Using pkgng in real life
I have been using pkgng on a few machines now and I'd like to share some thoughts about how it behaves in real-world situations. Overall, I'm very happy with it and it's immensely better than what we had before. There are some rough edges which need to be solved but those are mostly a property of the ports system itself rather than pkgng.
pkgng – best thing since sliced bread!
FreeBSD (and BSDs in general) traditionally have source-based upgrades and installs which extends to the third party software collections - ports or pkgsrc and similar. This is all fine and offers unprecedended flexibility when tailoring system to specific needs, but sometimes this flexibility is less important than ease of use or time savings which can only be achieved with binary packages. Enter pkgng, the next-generation binary package management system by Baptiste Daroussin and others, which replaces the old-style ports and packages system.
Writing a GEOM GATE module, part 4
To wrap up this small tutorial on writing ggate modules, I'll describe in brief how the simple implementation of ggvd works. Unfortunately, it has a major limitation in functionality due to a FreeBSD bug but it still may be good enough as an example.
Writing a GEOM GATE module, part 3
Writing a GEOM GATE module, part 2
This is the second part of my short tutorial on writing a GEOM gate module for FreeBSD. If you missed it, see the first part for an introduction.
In this part, I'd like to talk about some of the mechanisms, ideas and constrains in GEOM and GEOM GATE (ggate).
Writing a GEOM GATE module, part 1
For various reasons, including the common good, I'd like to write a short-ish tutorial about writing GEOM GATE modules for FreeBSD. I hope to do this in a series of a few blog posts, dealing with the steps of writing such a module, this being the first post in the series. Finally, I'd like to do it while also creating a usable module, so this will not be an academic excercise but (hopefully) useful work.
I'd like to start with explaing what GEOM and GEOM GATE are.
BSDCan 2012 – Day 2
The second, and unfortunately the last day of BSDCan was filled with interesting talks, again with much overlap. There are simply so many interesting things going on in FreeBSD that all of them simply don't fit in just two days of conferencing! From all of those, I'd recommend (even though I wasn't able to attend some of them) the talks on netmap, ZFS, AWS, pkgng and IPv6 security - don't miss them when the videos go online!
DevSummit 2012 day 2 and BSDCan 2012 day 1
The second day of the DevSummit continued with interesting technical discussions in the Virtualization track, which was paralleled with the Teaching OS Courses track and the Administration and Toolchain tracks. The BSDCan day began with an epic bagpipe performance followed by full four tracks of highly interesting topics - unfortunate as there is much overlap. I gave my talk on Bullet Cache which describes some of the more interesting technical aspects and presents new performance measurements.
BSDCan 2012 – DevSummit
Another year - another BSDCan! It's very nice and even comforting to see such a large number of familiar faces again, and even more as the ranks are filled in by fresh new developers. The conference and the Developers' Summit before it promise a great program and a great time for the BSDers.
Google Summer of Code
Time flies! The last year's barely passed and here we are again - another Google Summer of Code. Even though the deadline for student's submissions is less than 24 hours ahead, I'd still take the opportunity to call anyone interested, anywhere in the world, to submit a proposal - it's fun to participate!
Donate to the FreeBSD foundation!
I'm on a trip so I'll be brief: Donate to the FreeBSD Foundation! It supports and funds vital FreeBSD development! See more at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ .
Donate to the FreeBSD foundation!
I'm on a trip so I'll be brief: Donate to the FreeBSD Foundation! It supports and funds vital FreeBSD development! See more at http://www.freebsdfoundation.org/donate/ .
Call for testing the BSD Hypervisor (BHyVe)
Those who were present at BSDCan 2011 have probably seen or heard about the unveling of BHyVe, the native hypervisor for FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very much lacking virtualization features (not counting jails) and this is in any case excellent news for the project! Interested users are now invited to test it!
Call for testing the BSD Hypervisor (BHyVe)
Those who were present at BSDCan 2011 have probably seen or heard about the unveling of BHyVe, the native hypervisor for FreeBSD. FreeBSD is very much lacking virtualization features (not counting jails) and this is in any case excellent news for the project! Interested users are now invited to test it!
Bullet Cache – RC1 and main features
I've just uploaded the first Release Candidate version of Bullet Cache! It is basically feature complete and done, and I'm happy to say that it looks like I have a small number of users and also some feedback on the project - so keep it up :) At this point I'd like to shortly talk about what made me write Bullet Cache - which also leads to why it was done the way it is and what are its main strengths. For the impatient, these are flexibility in cached data expiry and performance, but read on for the details...
Bullet Cache – RC1 and main features
I've just uploaded the first Release Candidate version of Bullet Cache! It is basically feature complete and done, and I'm happy to say that it looks like I have a small number of users and also some feedback on the project - so keep it up :) At this point I'd like to shortly talk about what made me write Bullet Cache - which also leads to why it was done the way it is and what are its main strengths. For the impatient, these are flexibility in cached data expiry and performance, but read on for the details...