The arrow of time

A Security Officer bulletin has been issued recently to announce the end-of-line for FreeBSD 6.x - which is an opportunity to discuss how FreeBSD release cycle generally works (for those not familiar with it).

I've seen a HP "LeftHand" / StorageWorkd P4000 SAN device recently and got quite good impressions off of it. One thing that occured to me is - why didn't anyone try this before? Certainly both Linux (to lesser extent) and FreeBSD (to a somewhat greater) contain the pieces for it, and have contained for some years now. In fact, several people did such setups privately or internally for their companies but there was apparently never a concentrated effort to sell it.

Martin Matuska has issued two calls for testers with patches that improve various aspects of  ZFS performance.

The patches are basically ports of OpenSolaris' code and should improve write performance and stat() syscall performance. The patches are available for testing on 9-CURRENT and 8-STABLE.

The industry is moving toward 4k-sectored hard disk drives - a bit late though but better late then newer. However, in the interim period where compatibility for 4k sector drives is not widespread, drives such as WD's EARS series are using internal translation to present themselves as 512-byte sector drives, leading to unexpectedly horrible write performance. As a band-aid I'm proposing an almost trivial patch to glabel which allows it to have a "forced sector size" specified and as a result can present 4k sectors to the file system even if the physical drive doesn't. See also: glabel.

A small personal project I've occasionally been working on is "Encrypted notepad" - a simple (really simple!) Notepad-like text editor whose only distinguishing attribute is that it saves and loads strongly encrypted files. Now, I have an Android version too :)

I've bought small electronics on e-bay before and had reasonably good experience - no especially bad products, but also no surprisingly good ones - which is ok, it is as expected and I was happy with it - until today. A new microSD card arrived (for my phone) which was branded - and priced - as class 6 (SD "classes" are basically performance indicators in MB/s), but behaves worse than a class 2 card. The packaging (which looks good and solid, but who knows...) says "Team Group Inc." and the e-bay seller is "pc_galaxy".

FreeBSD 8.1 has been released! This is mostly an maintainance release with few major changes:

• zfsloader added

• zpool version of ZFS subsystem updated to version 14

• NFSv4 ACL support in UFS and ZFS; support added to cp(1), find(1), getfacl(1), mv(1), and setfacl(1) utilities

• UltraSPARC IV/IV+, SPARC64 V support

• SMP support in PowerPC G5

Some of the other interesting new features are: the ability to use VLAN tags with TSO, HAST high availability storage (disk replication) and new CAM-integrated SATA subsystem (not the default in 8.x to avoid breaking ABI).

At around the same time, a new FreeBSD status report was published.

Running a database on a memory file system serves a dual (and unfortunately not easy to deintertwine) purpose: testing database scalability and testing operatin system scalability. On the other hand, I did it just to see what the results could look like given an almost infinitely fast storage device :)