Re: [Semi-OT] Linus talks about git
I think you mean't obnoxious and boorish, not interesting? On Sun, Jun 21, 2009 at 5:42 PM, waltwa1...@myrealbox.com wrote: Agree or disagree, he's an interesting speaker: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=4XpnKHJAok8
Re: GSoC: LiveCD
What's the purpose of this LiveCD? Who's it targeting? Seems like a bit of a shotgun approach for everyone to submit what they want on it. It's much easier to determine what should be on it when it's got some very clear goals. I tend to use LiveCDs for: - fixing problems (though I use bootable USB for the most part nowadays) - using systems that are otherwise 'locked down' such as university pcs/etc to browser / listen to music / whatever may otherwise not work - test out a new OS, or show the OS off to others Those 3 uses alone would totally change either what's provided, or require a boot menu at least. For fixing a PC, you'd want the most stable kernel and minimal drivers (no audio, for example) and some decent recovery and diagnostic tools (archivers, file system drivers, etc). For an os replacement you'd want all drivers and very few beta features unless they really enhance the experience. For testing the OS or showing it off, you might want all the neat new features (hammer, vkernels, etc). There would be other uses, like instant clusters, etc, that would have yet more/other requirements. Anyway, I'll still send in what I want on it, but thought I'd add my two cents :) Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: hammer prune explanation
access the deleted directory entries. This wouldn't be an 'as-of' style access... it would be accessing all the active and deleted directory entries regardless of when they became deleted. What if I deleted a directory and re-created it? Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: 7-Zip / Bzip2
Which is not an impediment per-se. After all it's just a userland tool, not a library or even part of the kernel. Not to nit-pick, but it's LGPL, not GPL, so it's not *so* bad :) So, is 7z useful enough to add a fourth compression tool to the base system? And keep it there forever? (Remember that we also have to keep compress(1) for compatibility, even though it compresses worse and is slower than gzip, so the usefulness is very small.) I would argue that 'compress' should be removed and put in the ports tree. There's always this argument concerning shell scripts that are still using these tools...who's using one? If you're swapping to DragonflyBSD, chances are you're not worried about breaking compatibility a little, and it's not difficult to put it in the docs that it's been removed. I've given it a quick test and fed a 1 MB logfile to 7z. It was only marginally better than bz2 ( 1%), but it was noticeably slower. And bz2 is already painfully slow for both compression and decompression. Not everybody has a bz2 is painfully slow for compression, not decompression. Small files aren't much of a concern for any of this, though. As I mentioned previously, if you use the compression level argument with 7z, you can beat bzip2 by compression AND speed in many cases. I compressed a 4gb image 90mb smaller and 3 minutes faster than bzip2 with 7z's compression level '4'. 3 GHz multicore machine. That's why I still use gzip most of the time -- the compression is a little worse, but it's a *lot* faster. I wasn't suggesting removal of gzip. Just like not everyone has a 3 GHz multicore machine, not everyone is still using a crappy 486 --- they shouldn't be limited by the restrictions your particular machine has. There were even cases when people reported that they weren't able to decompress a bz2 file on a small system (embedded or otherwise), because it required several MB of RAM for decompression. It appears that 7z is even worse. The memory footprint of gunzip is negligible. RAM usage for compression depends on the level of compression you're using. If someone's going to be using DflyBSD for an embedded device with limited resources, they would tailor it accordingly and remove 7zip and bzip2. A great many systems don't need half the kernel modules either, that doesn't mean those should not have been added to DFly. It should also be mentioned that about every other year another compression tool pops up that claims to be better than all the others. Last year (or the year before) it was paq, before that it was rzip and lrzip, and so on. So this year it is 7z. What will be the next one? 7-zip has been around since ~2000. It's not hype. rzip's features, having more flexibility than just 100-900k block sizes in bzip2, should've been available in bzip2 from the start -- unfortunately some of Unix's best strengths are its greatest weaknesses. bzip2 can't simply be altered, otherwise compatibility will be broken. bzip2 would never have been added if gzip could've been modified at whim. bzip2 vs 7z: - 7z supports listing decompressed size of contained file(s) - 7z can compress faster with a better ratio, or a much better ratio but slower - 7z can create volumes. while I realize one can use 'split'...try putting a huge set of volumes back together on windows. 7z has a really decent windows port, tooand ports on many other OSes. Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: 7-Zip / Bzip2
Well, the issue is not so much one of download bandwidth as it is one of accessibility. Everyone has gzip, not everyone has 7z (yet). I would rather not have multiple compression formats on the download site, nor require that people have 7z in order to be able to unpack our release CDs! This is the 'bandwagon' I was referring to --- it's a chicken and egg problem. I can safely say I would rarely be using gzip or bzip2 if 7z were in the base installs of all Linux/BSD releases. No one uses compress any more because gzip/bzip2 are in the base. If they weren't, you'd still see .Z files everywhere. Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: 7-Zip / Bzip2
For everyone concerned with timing, I tested compressing a 4gb image of a quad boot USB key with a variety of junk on it at compression level 4. It still beats bzip2 by 90 mb and was almost 3 minutes quicker: # time -h bzip2 -k key.img 11m59.71s real 10m39.48s user 5.03s sys # time -h 7z a -mx=4 key.img.7z key.img 8m39.02s real 7m38.57s user 4.95s sys # ls -la | grep key -rw-r- 1 sol wheel 4102029312 Mar 8 11:27 key.img -rw--- 1 root wheel 904489376 May 6 11:38 key.img.7z -rw-r- 1 sol wheel 997632056 Mar 8 11:27 key.img.bz2 Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
7-Zip / Bzip2
Hi, Posted this to kernel@ by accident, please reply here instead :) I just wanted to know if there's any interest for the devs to add something like p7zip to the base install; even if it's a simple fork that only supports 7z. While 7zip is about as obnoxiously slow as bzip2, it usually gets much better compression. That's not why I'm suggesting it though - what really gets me is that bzip2 has no list option. Does that 10 gb bzip2 backup archive contain 100gb of data, or 200gb? Other than dumping the entire archive to /dev/null through wc, there's really no way to do it. Gzip will list files, but its compression ratio is awful. I imagine that other OSes are going to be watching Dragonfly very carefully in the next while as new the features (especially HAMMER) mature. Maybe adding 7z will get yet another bandwagon going and there will be support across the board :) Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: A great BSD-compatible UPS?
There's a port of apcupsd for bsd - I use it with a few APC UPSes at work --- seems to run well. On 3/30/07, Jose timofonic [EMAIL PROTECTED] wrote: Hello, I'm going to buy an UPS due to electrical problems in my home. Some of my computer stuff was damaged by electrical problems and now I'm planning to spend my money on a decent UPS solution. I would like to know about brands and models with great quality that can be durable and really protecting and avoiding problems or forced shutdowns. I'm asking here because it seems the best way to know a BSD compatible one and practical opinions from some BSD gurus. I seen a lot of different models from a lot of brands and not sure what to get, so some help about this could be great for me. I will use it with a few computers, one of them will have a bunch of HDDs. A friend asked me for a solution for two computer too, he had recently a problem in his work and wants to buy an UPS as soon as possible too. It seems electrical problems are more nightmares for computer than I thinked. Thanks in advance. Best regards, timofonic __ LLama Gratis a cualquier PC del Mundo. Llamadas a fijos y móviles desde 1 céntimo por minuto. http://es.voice.yahoo.com
Asynchronous Console Messages?
Hi everyone, I've always been a little curious about the way the typical unix console works. Why is it that applications must wait for text to be displayed on the console before continuing operation? Shouldn't these messages merely enter into a queue to be displayed whenever the system can get to them instead of slowing things down to the maximum speed they can be output? Perhaps I'm mistaken about this issue :) -- and I'm certain that if I'm not there's a reason for it working the way it does. I wouldn't mind knowing the reason, though! Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: Argh, Stray interrupts 2006
O_o You guys sure waste a lot of time on trolls. Too bad Danial didn't post any official title, he's starting to remind me of the Jerry Taylor incident. It's pretty clear this guy is too ignorant to have 23 years of life experience, let alone that much time using unixes. I vote for the ban :) - BC
Re: MBR apparently overwritten!
Hi Petr, Rebuilding a partition table is relatively trivial - err...compared to some other data recovery tasks anyway. You should first check to see if the MBR is actually ruined (see what fdisk sees as the partitions on the disk). Chances are something else is wrong, not your MBR. Oh, before you try messing around on the disk - you might want to google around for backed up MBRs. I know that windows detects changes to your MBR, not sure if any OSes keep a real backup. You might also consider waiting to see if anyone else has a better suggestion than re-writing it. Anyway, if it's borked, you should re-write value boot code (using fdisk or fbsd's sysinstall or something) and then start locating the boot sector for each partition with a disk editor. The first one will probably be at sector 64. Valid bootsectors end with the bytes 55AAh. The next step is to find out how big that partition is. I've never seen a boot sector that didn't contain the # of sectors for that partition somewhere in its data. If you google for boot sector information for the particular file system it belongs to, there should be info about the offset to this value. Write it down. Once you have the sector # to the bootsector and the number of sectors for the partition you can go back to the MBR and type it back in to the appropriate locations. If you need a disk editor, look for wde_v30b.zip - I coded in a bootsector search function. It'll take awhile but it should find your windows boot sector. I think norton's diskedit makes editing these fields easy, but I can't recall if it supported editing the mbr and entire disk or just fat partitions. Best Regards, Ben Cadieux
Re: [OT] Disk sector size
Anyone have an idea why Windows and Linux are using the same ID for their data partition? What's the point in having a much longer partition type ID if we're going to be overlapping anyway? That and...could we possibly find a worse way of storing it? Note that only the first three blocks are byte-swapped. - BC
Re: DragonFly MBR
It would be nice to have some better descriptions for people that like to multi-boot (like me). At this point there's lots of room, we'll see when I've added more features. I can always figure out a way to optimize it. At the moment it just shows fat/ntfs as being Windows - since there's likely very few people booting DOS on Fat in comparison. But I guess we'd need a vote on what file systems should say what :) Does that also support booting the last booted OS like our boot0 or does it have the concept of a default choice which is used when the user does nothing for a while. I forgot about this. I'll add it in :) - BC
Re: DragonFly MBR
Thanks for your offer, yet, what's the gain with your MBR? Or put differently: what's wrong with the one from FreeBSD? Well, what would you like to see different? I never really decided on anything...but perhaps a boot from floppy option? A visual countdown? When all the journaling features are in, will you want to change the partition type to reflect it? - BC
Re: DragonFly MBR
I would suggest that FAT come out saying DOS/Win9x and NTFS say WinNT +. My reason for that is based on the fact that the old version of That sounds reasonable enough; everyone agree? Oh and yea, 3.x, 9x and ME all boot DOS underneath ME Kind of just pretended it wasn't there. - BC
DragonFly MBR
Hi Everyone, I wrote an MBR at one point - it's quite similar to FreeBSD's, except instead of function keys it looks something like this: Windows DragonFlyBSD FreeBSD Uhm, paste that into vi or something that has a set font size and it will make sense! Anyway, you use the arrow keys and pick an OS. Of course, I could change how any of this works (like the F1, F2, etc if everyone prefers). I thought maybe DragonFly could use its own MBR instead of having a slightly modded one from FreeBSD. Just say the word and I'll fire the source off your way - it's in nasm. I'll need to mod it to add support for other things though, like multiple hard disks. (FreeBSD has an F5-Disk2 option). - BC
offer for bugtracking
Hi, I've been reading the dragonfly digest and noticed the conversations about bug tracking. I realize it was in the kernel list (I'm not subscribed to it, don't really wish to be). If you don't find what you're looking for - I'll code one in php if you'd like. - BC
