The arrow of time

The long expected new version has just been released! Why should you care?

I'm reading this article about LPARs and WPARs in AIX and it sounds familiar.

It looks like LPARs are equivalent to full virtual machines, like in VMWare, VirtualBox, or Xen, and WPARs look like Jails.

Like in most ventures, there are basically two ways things get done in FreeBSD - either people do it themselves (mostly) or they pay someone else to do it.

By donating to the FreeBSD Foundation you can help develop FreeBSD without needing or knowing how to code. The Foundation is very close to its goal for this year (which is surprising because of the overall apparent shortage of money) and needs only a bit more to ensure funding for its projects.

I've been reading the FreeBSD Release Notes for version 1.1, published in 1993. Two things are interesting to me here:

1. The only name in the old core team I recognize is Jordan Hubbard, and he's not a FreeBSD developer any more (joined Apple for Mac OS X)
2. Some problems, both technical and organizational, are always repeating themselves.

These things are "normal" and present not only in Open-source projects but in the entire industry (and of course in other industries), and are actually a sign of a healthy enteprise. Developers / employees arrive and leave, some stay as graybeard alumni to teach the next generation, etc. and the technology itself has a sort of cycle to itself that makes old things new again.

One of the most important aspect of "full" virtualization products, at least for me, is the ability to create and deploy "appliance"-like virtual machines with server software (hmm, like PostgreSQL) packaged together with an operating system as a black box. This package is then independant of the underlying OS so today I can deploy it on Windows, tomorrow on Linux - and maybe one day if host virtualization solutions get developed - on FreeBSD.

I was talking with a friend about IPv6 and I remembered hearing about public IPv6 gateways. 6bone is gone but go6 (or is it freenet6?) is apparently its public successor.

It's really so extremely simple to set up I was actually kind of dissapointed at having nothing intelligent to do except simple config file editing.

ursaminor:~> ping6 www.freebsd.org
PING6(56=40+8+8 bytes) 2001:5c0:8fff:fffe::d019 --> 2001:4f8:fff6::21
16 bytes from 2001:4f8:fff6::21, icmp_seq=0 hlim=55 time=218.891 ms
16 bytes from 2001:4f8:fff6::21, icmp_seq=1 hlim=55 time=241.844 ms
^C
--- www.freebsd.org ping6 statistics ---
2 packets transmitted, 2 packets received, 0.0% packet loss
round-trip min/avg/max/std-dev = 218.891/230.368/241.844/11.476 ms

The results speek for themselves (including the latency).

In a perfect world, where I somehow manage to have millions of $currency, I'd sponsor the development of:

• Host-side virtualization for FreeBSD: either qemu / kvm, virtualbox, vmware or xen-dom0. This is the first and "hot" item on this list - there are many opportunities where I could use FreeBSD as a host for other operating systems instead of reverse (I don't care for "guest" support like xen dom-U since full virtualization solution exist and are used almost everywhere. Well, except Amazon EC2 and such.) One of the best features (for me at least) of virtualization like this is the possibility to move virtual machines between (different) host operating systems. Jails are of very limited usefulness in this scenario.
  
• Finalization and inclusion of the FUSE kernel module or port of NetBSD's puffs in the main kernel, where it would be better supported and updated with the rest of the system. FUSE allows for very easy experimentation with file systems, which are my pet interest, but more importantly it enables the usage of many already made FUSE file systems like ntfs3g and various network file systems and emulations of thereof (sshfs, webdav).
• Porting of either ext3, ext4, JFS or XFS to FreeBSD. Though ext3/4 can be mounted as ext2, journalling is lost in this case. XFS kind of exists but was never finished (write support is missing). For me, the ability to share file systems between FreeBSD and Linux (usually with VMs) is almost as important as having a well known low-maintainance (and low-resource using, as opposed to ZFS) journalling file system.

As seen elsewhere:

1. Grab the nearest book.
2. Open it to page 56.
3. Find the fifth sentence.
4. Post the text of the sentence in your journal along with these instructions.
5. Don’t dig for your favorite book, the cool book, or the intellectual one: pick the CLOSEST.

What I have is:

A soft blue twilight lay across the city, increasing by a hundredfold its air of magic and mystery. -- from Roger Zelazny's & Robert Sheckley's "A Farce to Be Reckoned With"

The quote is about a fictious version of Venice, where the majority of the story happenes. The story itself is a set in the same universe as Zelazny's "Bring me the head of Prince Charming", and has the same twisted-fairytale humor (though of a bit lesser quality than the original). Still, very enjoyable :)