77: Noah's L2ARC

This week on the show, we'll be chatting with Alex Reece and Matt Ahrens about what's new in the world of OpenZFS. After that, we're starting a new tutorial series on submitting your first patch. All the latest BSD news and answers to your emails, coming up on BSD Now - the place to B.. SD.

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Revisiting FreeBSD after 20 years

With comments like "has Linux lost its way?" floating around, a Debian developer was prompted to revisit FreeBSD after nearly two decades
This blog post goes through his experiences trying out a modern BSD variant, and includes the good, the bad and the ugly - not just praise this time
He loves ZFS and the beadm tool, and finds the FreeBSD implementation to be much more stable than ZoL
On the topic of jails, he summarizes: "Linux has tried so hard to get this right, and fallen on its face so many times, a person just wants to take pity sometimes. We’ve had linux-vserver, openvz, lxc, and still none of them match what FreeBSD jails have done for a long time."
The post also goes through the "just plain different" aspects of a complete OS vs. a distribution of various things pieced together
Finally, he includes some things he wasn't so happy about: subpar laptop support, virtualization being a bit behind, a myriad of complaints about pkgng and a few other things
There was some decent discussion on Hacker News about this article too, with counterpoints from both sides ***

s2k15 hackathon report: network stack SMP

The first trip report from the recent OpenBSD hackathon in Australia has finally been submitted
One of the themes of this hackathon was SMP (symmetric multiprocessing) improvement, and Martin Pieuchot did some hacking on the network stack
If you're not familiar with him, he gave a presentation at EuroBSDCon last year, titled Taming OpenBSD Network Stack Dragons
Teaming up with David Gwynne, they worked on getting some bits of the networking code out of the big lock
Hopefully more trip reports will be sent in during the coming weeks
Most of the big code changes should probably appear after the 5.7-release testing period ***

From BIND to NSD and Unbound

If you've been running a DNS server on any of the BSDs, you've probably noticed a semi-recent trend: BIND being replaced with Unbound
BIND was ripped out in FreeBSD 10.0 and will be gone in OpenBSD 5.7, but both systems include Unbound now as an alternative
OpenBSD goes a step further, also including NSD in the base system, whereas you'll need to install that from ports on FreeBSD
Instead of one daemon d

Published on 10 years, 10 months ago