On 11/29/13 15:14, John Marino wrote: > 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 >
You will have a much better experience adding disks to HAMMER than ZFS. HAMMER relies on hardware raid for redundancy, and you can just add "hammer volume-add" new disks and it will concatenate them. With ZFS, you have to add disks one leg at a time. So, with a triple-parity raid10 with 2 legs (6 disks), you will have to add 3 disks at a time. To a raidz2 with 8 disks, you will need to add 8 at a time... You get the picture. - Nikolai Lifanov
