Beginners questions

[John Marino]

On 11/29/2013 18:48, Cassandra von Ahrcanburg wrote:
> Hello everybody!
> 
> I've read quite a few of the posts on this list and from what I can
> tell there is a certain lack of females. :-) Oh well, with me being a
> computer nerd and all I am pretty much used to being around men. :-P

Yeah, if there are many around they don't say much.
Although we had a female GSoC participant this year, she was around a
lot this summer.


> Graphics board
> Since I am buying and I have no personal preferences towards AMD or
> nVidia, maybe you can tell me which company is the better choice for
> Dragonfly. I am a gamer at times, so I will be buying something in the
> area of an X770 (or a similar AMD model, maybe an R9 280). I have asked
> this question before in a German BSD newsgroup (concerning FreeBSD).

nVidia is not a good choice for FreeBSD.
Their current models are supported via proprietary BLOBs on FreeBSD
which are loaded by kernel modules.  While it's likely still possible
create a wrapper and use the FreeBSD blob on DragonFly (this was done a
few years ago), nothing exists today.

AMD Radeons have a slightly more promising future.  The older drivers
work, and the new KMS-based drivers have had support imported from
FreeBSD but this is still too unstable to use.  It's on our to-do list
to fix before the next release.

Apparently your best bet is KMS-based intel graphics chips.  People are
using these with great success, but I am not speaking from personal
experience.  As a (sad) nVidia customer, I'm stuck on vesa driver.

> HAMMER2
> The second version of this legendary FS won't be out for some time yet,
> as I have written on the list. I have read a few things that are
> working now but very little about what the endgame is. Is there a
> document out there that says what HAMMER2 will do?

The only docs I know are about two years old.  Matt posts from time to
time on the mail list about current status (which can also be seen on
Shining Silence), so google can help there.

Here's some links though:
http://leaf.dragonflybsd.org/mailarchive/users/2012-02/msg00020.html
http://lists.dragonflybsd.org/pipermail/users/2013-November/090271.html
http://bsd.slashdot.org/comments.pl?sid=4488529&cid=45528079

> 
> HAMMER
> The server I am building will mainly be for cold storage. I had
> considered ZFS (and still am) because it also contains a volume manager
> and I can "grow" the filesystem should the need arise. With "grow" I
> mean: add one or more drives to the pool and let the FS heal itself.
> Not elegant, but it should work fine. I plan to make a raidz2
> (RAID6-like). Is this sort of thing possible with HAMMER? I know that
> HAMMER won't do this by itself, I will need LVM with that. But can I
> create a RAID6-like "thingy" :-) and grow it if I have to?

I'll have to let others comment here.
I know about HAMMER1 just enough to be dangerous. :)

John