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A few days ago I received the latest issue of Linux Journal Magazine. I must admit that one of the sections I look forward to reading is diff -u. This section summarizes the latest updates and discussions of the Linux kernel development community. It becomes much easier to read a summary as opposed to signing up for the mailing list because you will just get bombarded with e-mails which can be overwhelming the majority of the time. While reading I came across a Montavista developed project called pramfs. In summary pramfs is a non-volatile RAM based file system, similar to your ramfs and tmpfs with a few differences to distinguish it from the others and in turn adapted for an embedded environment. Two obvious differences are that it is persistent like a traditional disk-based file system and does not reside in volatile DRAM. Pramfs is not new. It was originally announced back in 2004. It is designed to be a simplified file system that does not carry the same weight of the journal-based file systems.

Yesterday afternoon I was really bored at work and had eventually navigated to a website dedicated to Easter Eggs that could be found on an operating system, software application and more. Naturally I went to the list of operating systems and started looking up the operating systems which were accessible to me. As I read through the Linux and UNIX related ones, I had already known some but there were a few that I was interested in trying.

Recently I came across this article on h-online.com discussing some of the new features and functionality that is to be expected in the 2.6.31 Linux kernel. As I am usually more interested in data storage technologies, it was the file system and other storage concepts that drew my attention. I will only cover a few of the listed topics. You can read a full list of these patches provided in the h-online link I posted above. Some updates include a large patch for the btrfs file system which have tuned the file system to achieve greater performance. It is also noted that in this release btrfs will be less memory hungry and the SSD mode has been improved. Early benchmarks comparing both standard and SSD modes have shown the early implementation of SSD mode to be less than ideal. I am interested to see this improvement, especially as Flash-based SSDs increase in usage and popularity.

Mark your calendars, for 12 August 2009 deserves to be remembered for all eternity. At least it was an important day for me. Because one thing that I was missing on OpenSolaris and in the GNOME desktop environment was GNOME-DO. This application was one of many that truly made me efficient in a GNU/Linux environment. It is unfortunate though that a package of it does not exist in OpenSolaris. Even when installing Mono (pkg.opensolaris.org/contrib) and all the necessary components, I still had problems building the package. One day I may revisit that but in the meantime I decided to concentrate on building and installing the gnome-launch-box. For the most part, gnome-launch-box will do all that I really need it to do.

Ever since I started working with OpenSolaris (release 2008.05 to build 118: 2010.02), I have been suffering through some of the longer load times. While the distribution is maturing fairly well and quick, the boot times are just horrible. And to my understanding the culprit is ZFS. OpenSolaris utilizes ZFS as its default file system. On top of that, one thing that I still cannot understand is why GRUB defaults its timeout value to 60 seconds. 60 seconds! Why!?! Who needs this 60 seconds and/or who wants to be constantly annoyed to hit enter to the default kernel image, initiating the boot process? Either way, this can be modified. On OpenSolaris, editing the GRUB boot options is a little different from your traditional UNIX/Linux operating system. Note that this article is for Intel architectures and not SPARC.

After writing my article on The Linux RAM Disk for Linux+ Magazine and also after writing a very generic Linux RAM disk block device module, I decided to play around with the concept of RAM disks on OpenSolaris 2009.06. I must admit that this was actually a very great learning experience. One that I wish to share with the reader. Note that this post will be separated into two section: (2) tmpfs and (3) ramdiskadm.

One of the most volatile and yet needed industries is the data storage industry. As computing technologies become more cloud centric and rely upon the web for business, productivity, education to even recreation, there is a constant push to increase capacities but even more so increase I/O throughput. As a result of recent demands, our approach with these technologies need to be re-evaluated. The primary focus of this article is on the future of data storage concepts and the limited life and functionality of RAID.

During this time I had already grown extremely comfortable with GNU/Linux. Especially when it came to the text editor tools. I have always been a fan of vim (vi improved); but when I would hop from one platform to the other, I always found myself getting stuck with the way Solaris and now, OpenSolaris default their environment.

I first reviewed the ASUS Eee PC 901 when I was getting frustrated with the Xandros Linux customized installation that it came pre-installed with. Within a couple of days, I immediately installed Easy Peasy over it and had a significantly better experience. And while Canonical was pushing their Ubuntu Netbook Remix, I recently decided to install the desktop release and have my netbook run the standard 9.04 release of the Ubuntu distribution. Below are the results to my experience.

Anyways, whenever virtualizing a non-Windows operating system which utilizes the X Windowing system over VirtualBox, it may be beneficial to have some flexibility on supported resolutions for the GUI. For example, I was using OpenSolaris 2008.11 and VirtualBox seems to create a “virtual” monitor where the operating system (specifically X) is unable to read the monitor’s EDID information to obtain supported resolution information (among other things). As a result of this, by default X assigns 800×600@60 and 640×480@60 as supported display formats. When you are working on a wider screen that supports something larger, this makes for an uncomfortable computing experience; especially with limited graphical space on the virtual client.

For those of you who are regular visitors, you may already know that before I started playing with GNU/Linux (2001/2) I was using FreeBSD. And while I continue to use GNU/Linux, I still hold an emotional tie to BSD-based operating systems. It was not until recently that I had decided to give the latest version of PC-BSD a try. This is version 7.1: Galileo Edition. A side note: PC-BSD is a desktop oriented version of FreeBSD intended to be extremely user friendly, primarily because of their implementation of their PBI package management system along with other features.

Most of you may already be aware of Oracle’s acquisition of Sun Microsystems. If not, here is an article stating just that from Sun’s website. I read the news as soon as it was published on the net along with the reactions of Sun users for Sun products. What will be the future of mySQL or OpenOffice? It just dawned on me yesterday: What will be the future of ZFS and Btrfs, seeing how Chris Mason, the lead developer to Btrfs works for Oracle?

Recently many have noted a comment made by Mark Shuttleworth in response to Canonical’s support of WINE and Microsoft Windows compatability). The community response to Shuttleworth’s comments were of mixed results. I must admit, that I agree with Shuttleworth.

Recently I have been reading articles about the new Btrfs and its benchmarks for the Linux kernel. I have also been reading other articles relating to file system maintenance. At this point, regarding the article on file system maintenance, I am going to have to say “who cares.”

As I had mentioned in my last post, I was planning to upgrade from Sun’s VirtualBox 2.1.4 to 2.2.0. You can read my full review of 2.1.4 here. Well, I installed it over the weekend but I have not had much time to play around with it.

For the past month or so I have been reading of the potential acquisition of Sun Microsystems by IBM. I have seen this dubbed as the Blue Sun. After a month of negotations it now looks like this may be a reality. What does the future hold if and when this pushes through? What are we to expect?

I decided to finally check out OpenSolaris 2008.11. While this release came out back in November of 2008 (hence the 2008.11 naming convention), it has taken me this long to finally give it a chance. Maybe it is because I am still somewhat skeptical with the whole OpenSolaris Project and still do not know what to make of it…yet.

Device-mapper (hereafter, dm) is one of the best collection of device drivers that I have ever worked with. It brings high availability, flexibility and more to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Device-mapper is a Linux 2.6 kernel infrastructure that provides a generic way to create virtual layers of a block device while supporting stripping, mirroring, snapshots, concatenation, multipathing, etc. While many modules are built on top of device-mapper, the focus of this article is on multipath-tools.

Lately I have been reading a lot about Ext4, Btrfs and the next generation of Linux file systems in general. What frustrates me about all these articles is the lack of understanding in what the file system is attempting to accomplish/address.

Truth be told. I started using GNU/Linux as early as 2002 with Red Hat 7.3. I was coming off of FreeBSD at the time, so I had some experience with a UNIX-like operating system. So when I say “a trip down memory lane”, from experience I can only go as far back sd the Linux kernel 2.4.18-3, which was the kernel in the release candidate of Red Hat 7.3.