Monthly Archives: April 2003

tazo (yoyo the next generation)

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okay, so the $HOSTNAME-ng tag is getting a bit dated, it seems like it’s the monash favourite, so tazo (the “work-in-progress” name for the new yoyo) is up and I’m helping to get it up and running.

I seem to have been the guy doing most of the stuff so far, the /root/CHANGED file is mostly me. I’ve started to bitch in it. Bitch about FreeBSD that is.

The ports system is cool, when it works. and when you don’t have stupid proxy authentication to contend with. oh, and an incomplete mirror.aarnet.edu.au

i think i’m doing things the right way, well – the way the handbook tells me and using portupgrade \*

oh, installing PHP4 has segfaulted. that’s fun. NOT!

allocation groups and resizing

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shrinking an FS with allocation groups should only involve the redistributing of data in the last allocation group.

expanding should be pretty simple. possible resizing of last allocation group, plus the adding of empty ones.

hmm… i want resize() call in vfs!

XFS and other cool things

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Been re-reading a lot of the XFS papers that are on the SGI website (http://oss.sgi.com/projects/xfs/) and thinking more about what I want out of an object store. There are a lot of similar design goals (I think) yet some very different ways of implementing things.

Having a large B+Tree full of every object could be quite nice, kinda like inodes on conventional UNIX filesystems. On the object-store layer, we’d be able to store small objects inside the inodes. Above this, the namespace layer could find out if we can pack something into an inode, and if so, optimize for that (e.g. linear list of files for directories under 1k).

The idea of having a very layered system is increasingly appealing to me.
This means we could have some very nice optimizations for some applications. Some systems would only ever care about the object-store itself (a squid like caching system for example) and others could care a lot about a namespace system (or even be one). An example of the latter could be a database.

Expandability for the future is a given, it has to be. 64bits seems like a lot now, but no doubt somebody will be pushing it in 10 years or so.

updated…

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Added my “MacOS X as UNIX” talk to the talks page, the linked list code to the junkcode page and generally thinking about actually putting up all that old stuff i’ve got lying around on my .mac account.

Which reminds me, i should really start migrating everything over to flamingspork.com…..

linux talk

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Well, it’s all prepared (http://www.flamingspork.com/talks/2003/04/intro_to_linux.pdf) and ready to go. Copies of the notes have been made, all ready to hand out. Have made 30, hopefully we’ll need more :)

And I do hope that enough students have heard of it!

Well, wish me luck…

Scholarship!

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Yesterday, being a Tuesday in Semester 1 for me, is a hell of a day. Long. Really long. Start at 10am. Finish about 9pm.

But, got home and opened the mail, one from monash. This time, not asking for money.

I’ve been awarded an Honours Scholarship for 2003!

I didn’t apply or anything, so I assume they have some other process:

“our school awards these scholarships to encourage the best and brightest students to stay on for additional studies in the Honours degree. We beleive that you will greatly benefit from this financial support to improve your knowledge of state-of-the-art developments in CS and IT”.

funky.