The arrow of time

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 :)

I haven't changed my opinion on Python's performance but it still is a great platform for doing small projects quickly. I've chosen Werkzeug for my project and so far I like it. It has just the right mix of low-level and high-level funcionalities for what I'm doing. Here are a few notes about it:

I've made a patch for newsyslog to use xz compression since I just assumed xz would be better because of its structure. After all, at least it doesn't process files in individual 900 kB chunks. But I think I've found a case where xz may be worse then bzip2.

I'm looking into starting an interesting little project and of course, one of the most fun phases of it all is choosing your technology stack. I'm going to do something a bit unusual, just because I can, but for starts, I've chosen Python/WSGI combination and within this palette of tools I've come across Werkzeug. It is a light-weight framework which I think will be perfect for the type of code I write - with an eye to what happens behind the scenes.

As announced before, ZFS v15 was successfuly imported into FreeBSD! For a time there was an option of importing just v15 or proceeding directly to v16 but the community has decided to first import the older version for reasons of stability and compatibility with Solaris 10 Update 8.

Julian Elischer, one of the kernel developers, pointed out that the new FreeBSD -CURRENT system cannot run binaries created for FreeBSD 1.0.

While probably completely irrelevant for FreeBSD's deployments todays, the fact that you can actually run binaries created in 1994 on recent releases (in a chroot jail!) is a point of pride in the FreeBSD community. It is actually awesome! Hopefully, recent incompatibilities will be resolved as they historically were :)