Include::RAWblog

Chunk of random news about what technologies are being introduced in “FreeBSD”:http://www.FreeBSD.Org 7. Some of them very important, long waited and with high expectations!

* *New sendfile() implementation, improved sosend()*

“…”Andre Oppermann”:http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/; has optimized kernel’s internal networking support. The new sendfile() implementation sends larger chunks of data at once and improves performance upto 5x when used with TSO and other new enhancements…”

* *TCP socket buffers auto-sizing*

“…”Andre Oppermann”:http://people.freebsd.org/~andre/; With TCP send buffer auto scaling and the default values below it supports 20Mbit/s at 100ms and 10Mbit/s at 200ms. Both read and write buffer are auto-sized…”

* *Superpages*

“…”Alan Cox”:http://www.cs.rice.edu/~ssiyer/r/superpages/osdi02superpages/ ; Most general processors provide support for memory pages of large sizes, called superpages. Superpages enable each entry in the translation lookaside buffer (TLB) to map a large physical memory region into a virtual address space…”

* *DTrace*

“… “John Birrell”:http://people.freebsd.org/~jb/dtrace/; Sun’s advanced diagnostic tool and language for operating systems. It’s currently being ported to FreeBSD…”; “…useful to track down bugs and performance defficiencies, but can also be used (and in the same way) by advanced system administrators…”

* *ZFS*

“…”Pawel Jakub Dawidek”:http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-current/2006-August/065306.html; Sun’s ZFS is in the process of being ported to FreeBSD, with the intention of offering most (or all) features found in the original implementation. It’s integrated with FreeBSD’s existing features like UFS and GEOM, thus offering the possibility of creating FreeBSD UFS file systems on ZFS volumes, and using GEOM providers to host ZFS file systems…”

* *gjournal*

“…”Pawel Jakub Dawidek”:http://bsdblogs.droso.org/pjd; Gjournal is a GEOM storage class that provides data journaling facilities to any providers (and consumers) the user needs. Since it takes special care to work well with disk drive hardware caches, it can be used to accelerate and provide reliability in many other uses, such as GELI and GBDE encrypted device providers…”

* *gvirstor*

“… “Ivan Voras”:http://wiki.freebsd.org/gvirstor; Gvirstor is a GEOM storage class that provides a storage device of arbitrary size in “overcommit” mode (i.e. larger than physically available storage).

* *SCHED_CORE*

“…David Xu; Since SCHED_ULE (the original version) was in general underperforming and not very stable, a new scheduler project was started, SCHED_CORE. This work is done by the author of libthr, so performance is an important goal…”

* *Security event auditing*

“…”Robert Watson & more”:http://www.freebsd.org/doc/en_US.ISO8859-1/books/handbook/audit.html; Event auditing allows the reliable, fine-grained, and configurable logging of a variety of security-relevant system events, including logins, configuration changes, and file and network access. These log records can be invaluable for live system monitoring, intrusion detection, and postmortem analysis. FreeBSD implements Sun’s published BSM API and file format, and is interoperable with both Sun’s Solaris and Apple’s Mac OS X audit implementations….”

* *privilege separation capabilities*

“…”Robert Watson”:http://lists.freebsd.org/pipermail/freebsd-arch/2006-October/005705.html; This is an idea similar to RBAC (as seen in Solaris & others) which allow the root privilege to be separated into several fine grained capabilities such as “can access the network” or “can bypass file system quotas”.

all this sounds just great, let them cook

read “*FreshSource.org*”:http://www.freshsource.org/