Here’s my quick experience trying out the ZFS alpha release with write support. First I built and installed ZFS and then ran the run.sh script to run the FUSE process that the kernel will use to provide the ZFS file system. Then the fun really begins.
Category Archives: Linux
First Alpha Release of ZFS Using FUSE for Linux with Write Support
Ricardo Correia has announced on his blog about porting Sun Solaris’s ZFS to Linux using FUSE that he has an alpha release with working write support out:
Performance sucks right now, but should improve before 0.4.0 final, when a multi-threaded event loop and kernel caching support are working (both of these should be easy to implement, FUSE provides the kernel caching).
He might be being a little modest about performance, one commenter (Stan) wrote:
Awesome! I compared a zpool with a single file (rather than a partition) compared to ext2 on loopback to a single file. With bonnie++, I was impressed to see the performance of zfs-fuse was only 10-20% slower than ext2.
Stan then went and tried another interesting test:
For fun, check out what happens when you turn compression on and run bonnie++. The bonnie++ test files compress 28x, and the read and write rates quadruple! It’s not a realistic scenario, but interesting to see.
Ricardos list of what should be working in this release is pretty impressive:
- Creation, modification and destruction of ZFS pools, filesystems, snapshots and clones.
- Dynamic striping (RAID-0), mirroring (RAID-1), RAID-Z and RAID-Z2.
- It supports any vdev configuration which is supported by the original Solaris implementation.
- You can use any block device or file as a vdev (except files stored inside ZFS itself).
- Compression, checksumming, error detection, self-healing (on redundant pools).
- Quotas and reservations.
Read his STATUS file to find out what isn’t working too (the main one there I spotted was zfs send and recv).
Caveat: this is an alpha release, so it might eat your data.
Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta 1 released
Vacation 1.2.7.0 beta1 has been released.
This is a complete rebase from the version of Vacation at Savannah Non-GNU which had been released under the modified BSD license with no advertising clause. This actually means Vacation finally links legally with GDBM (something I don’t believe people previously realised)!
This beta also includes a patch graciously supplied by Roberto Piola that makes Vacation ignore emails that have the SpamAssassin “X-Spam-Status: Yes” header set, indicating that it believes they are spam.
As a beta release from a new codebase you should keep the usual caveats in mind, it may not reply to emails, core dump randomly, blow up, eat your dog or even work properly. We would appreciate reports of all of those instances (well, except maybe for the dog) to the vacation-list kindly hosted at SourceForge.
See the mailing list summary for Vacation to find out how to join the list.
Nadolig Llawen a Blwyddyn Newydd Dda (as they say where I come from). 🙂
Chris
MythTV HOW-TO on Ubuntu Edgy
Worth keeping for future use – Garry Parker has an installation guide for MythTV on Ubuntu Edgy that looks pretty good. Don’t forget to read part two and his tips.
He’s also got a good sense of humour. 🙂
Note to self – remember to check for responses to my comment on his ATI driver problems.
Ubuntu 6.10 “Edgy Eft” Released
Yay, the latest version (( 6.10, codenamed Edgy Eft )) of Ubuntu (( using the Gnome desktop )), Kubuntu (( using the KDE desktop )), Xubuntu (( using the XFCE desktop )) and Edubuntu (( with support for educational institutions via thin client deployments and educational software )) has landed!
See the release notes for details of where to get it, what’s new, how to update an existing system and a required firmware update for Sun Niagra boxes to fix a Sun hypervisor bug that it can tickle.
Caller ID on your Television
Andrew’s done a neat trick and now has caller ID appearing on his television courtesy of combining Asterisk and MythTV. He’s got interesting plans..
Next I need to see if I can pause the TV, and resume it when the call ends.
Be nice if you could mark a program as “do not disturb” and get Asterisk to silently divert them to its voicemail system until it’s over, or phone up and tell it to record something you forgot (when you’ve not got Internet access).
Root exploit in binary nVidia drivers
LWN is reporting the release of information about and a proof of concept exploit for a root exploit bug in the binary nVidia drivers.
There are two NVIDIA graphics drivers for Linux: a closed-source binary blob driver provided by NVIDIA (which provides acceleration) and an open-source driver (which lacks acceleration). NVIDIA’s binary blob driver contains an error in its accelerated rendering of glyphs (text character data) that can be exploited to write arbitrary data to anywhere in memory. The open-source driver is not vulnerable.
1. Affected system(s):
KNOWN VULNERABLE:
o NVIDIA Driver For Linux v8774
o NVIDIA Driver For Linux v8762
PROBABLY VULNERABLE:
o NVIDIA Driver for FreeBSD
o NVIDIA Driver for Solaris
o Earlier versions
KNOWN FIXED:
o None
nVidia have been somewhat tardy in addressing the issue:
There have been multiple public reports of this NVIDIA bug on the NVNews forum [1,2] and elsewhere, dating back to 2004 [3]. NVIDIA’s first public acknowledgement of this bug was on July 7th, 2006. In a public posting [1] on the NVNews forum, an NVIDIA employee reported having reproduced the problem, assigned it bug ID 239065, and promised a fix would be forthcoming.
That was July – there is still no fix.
Edgy Eft Glibc/Pthread Dependency Problem
As ever, when you are playing with a development version of a distro things can, occasionally ((OK, I must have been lucky)), break. I’ve just got bitten with the following error:
Matching libraries: /usr/lib/libpthread.so.20 /lib/ld-linux.so.2 A copy of glibc was found in an unexpected directory. It is not safe to upgrade the C library in this situation; please remove that copy of the C library and try again.
As you might guess, this blocks apt-get dist-upgrade because it is (not unreasonably) being paranoid about not leaving your system in an completely stuffed state. So I went and consulted the Oracle and found a rather nice page on debugging dpkg dependency problems by Dan Shearer, an ex-Aussie now in Edinburgh.
I’m going to give this a try and see what happens, if you don’t hear from me for a few days then you know I messed something up. 🙂
Update: It worked, all that was needed was:
sudo mkdir /usr/lib/temp sudo mv /usr/lib/libpthread* /usr/lib/temp/ sudo apt-get install -f sudo mv /usr/lib/temp/* /usr/lib
Microsoft Promised to Guarantee BayStars Investment in SCO ?
The thlot pickens! Groklaw has “IBM’s Memo in Support of its Motion for SJ on SCO’s Interference Claims” (SJ is summary judgement I believe) and has the interesting quote from Lawrence Goldfarb, a BayStar Capital’s managing partner, about what happened when BayStar invested in SCO after Microsoft introduced them:
“Mr. Emerson and I discussed a variety of investment structures wherein Microsoft would ‘backstop,’ or guarantee in some way, BayStar’s investment…. Microsoft assured me that it would in some way guarantee BayStar’s investment in SCO.”
Apparently Mr Emerson was Microsoft’s “senior VP of corporate development and strategy“, but when BayStar invested things changed:
“Microsoft stopped returning my phone calls and emails, and to the best of my knowledge, Mr. Emerson was fired from Microsoft.”
Richard P. Emerson is on the MSFT’s 2002 list of directors, but is absent from the 2003 list..
LUV (Melbourne Chapter) October General Meeting: Intel Architecture and Hacked Slugs
Paraphrased from the original.
Start: Oct 3 2006 – 19:00
End: Oct 3 2006 – 21:00
Location: The Buzzard Lecture Theatre. Evan Burge Building. Trinity College Main Campus. The University of Melbourne. Parkville. Melways Map: 2B C5.
Intel’s Core Architecture by David Jones
David Jones is a Solutions Specialist with Intel Australia specialising in Server Architecture, working directly with end users such as Westpac Bank, Ludwig Cancer Research, VPAC and others advising on latest technologies available from Intel. David has been with Intel for 10 years and in IT for 20 years, coming from a UNIX background. Today David will introduce Intel’s latest Architecture (Core Architecture) and explain the differences between Hyperthreading and Dual Core technologies.
Hacked slugs, solving all your problems with little NAS boxes by Michael Still
This talk will discuss how to get your own version of Linux running on a Linksys NSLU2, known to the Linux community as a slug. This is a consumer grade network attached storage (NAS) system. These devices are quite inexpensive, are physically small, and run on low voltage DC power. I also discuss how to handle having your firmware flash go bad, and provide some thoughts on projects made possible by these devices. The presentation will also include extra demonstrations of the process of flashing and setting up one of these devices.
Ed: as usual there will be a pre-meeting curry at 6pm