Just another weblog
I merged the v4l translation layer into the linuxulator of 8‑stable. As in ‑current, this just means that linux apps (like Skype) can now use FreeBSD native devices which conform to the v4l ABI. The port multimedia/webcamd provides access to some webcams (or DVB hardware) via the v4l ABI.
People which want to test the linuxulator part should first make sure a native FreeBSD application has no problem accessing the device.
I got notified that my blog was not accessible for a while. Seems that at least recent firefox versions somehow changed their behavior in what is send in the HTTP-header. This caused an Apache RedirectMatch rule to trigger, which denies access to some parts of the blog for some users.
The WP-login, WP-dashboard, and logged-in users where not affected by this, so if you have some custom rules which deny access to your blog, make sure you make a test of your blog when logged-out.
I noticed that we do not have some automatic way of scrubbing a ZFS pool periodically. A quick poll on fs@ revealed, that there is interest in something like this. So I took a little bit of time to write a periodic daily script which checks if the last scrub is X days ago and scrubs a pool accordingly. The script has options to scrub all pools, or just a specific subset. It also allows to specify a time-interval between scrubs for each pool with different levels of fall-back (if no pool-specific interval is set, the default interval is used, which is set to 30 days if no other default interval is specified).
The discussion about this is happening over at fs@, so go there and have a look for the CFT (with a link to the WIP of the script) and the discussion if you are interested.
So far there are some minor details to sort out (and a little bit of documentation to write) before I can commit it… probably next week.
Brendan Gregg of Sun Oracle fame made a good explanation how to visualize latency to get a better understanding of what is going on (and as such about how to solve bottlenecks). I have seen all this already in various posts in his blog and in the Analytics package in an OpenStorage presentation, but the ACM article summarizes it very good.
Unfortunately Analytics is AFAIK not available in OpenSolaris, so we can not go out and adapt it for FreeBSD (which would probably require to port/implement some additional dtrace stuff/probes). I am sure something like this would be very interesting to all those companies which use FreeBSD in an appliance (regardless if it is a storage appliance like NetApp, or a network appliance like a Cisco/Juniper router, or anything else which has to perform good).
After all the big-impact commits (Gnome/gettext/KDE/X11/…) have settled now, I took the time to update audio/lame (I identified more than 100 ports with an (implicit) dependency on lame, 45 of them needed a portrevision bump; if I forgot/overlooked some, bump the revision yourself or notify me please). That is the first update of my ports where miwi@ did not beat me in committing an update since a year (he has implicit approval to do anything he wants with my ports).
I can be happy that he is/was this fast (and that we have such a productive and efficient committer), or I can be sad that I do not have the time anymore to be faster than I am with such things… or both. Hmmm… I think I will go the happy way. 😉
