Category: English

4k drive update

Just to let you know what the current status is wrt. 4k drives:

It looks like the consensus in the industry (meaning everyone except Western Digital) is to announce dual sector sizes, i.e. 512-byte logical sectors on top of 4096-byte physical sectors.

Ivan Voras has taken the initiative to organize a 4k BoF at BSDCan, although judging from the (private) email exchange on the subject, it’s quite possible that a decision will be made before then. Currently, it looks like we’re moving towards having the low-level driver report a 512-byte sector size and 4096-byte stripe width (and, if necessary, an appropriate offset) to GEOM. This preserves backward compatibility, but announces to GEOM consumers that it is a good idea to do I/O in 4096-byte blocks and align data structures on 4096-byte boundaries. All that remains is then to make sure that those GEOM consumers we care about (particularly ZFS) take advantage of this information.

The situation for WD “Advanced Format” drives is a bit more complex, because they announce 512-byte logical sectors. The only solution I can see is to add a quirk system to the ada driver (and possibly to ata as well, if we still care about it) similar to the ones we have for SCSI and USB devices, and match the model number. I believe /WD\d+[A-Z]+RS/ should match all existing Advanced Format drives with no false positives.

OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: triple $100 bounty

In case you hadn’t heard: Gregory Perry alleges that the FBI paid OpenBSD contributors to insert backdoors into OpenBSD’s IPSec stack, with his (Perry’s) knowledge and collaboration.

If that were true, it would also be a concern for FreeBSD, since some of our IPSec code comes from OpenBSD.

I’m having a hard time swallowing this story, though. In fact, I think it’s preposterous. Rather than go into further detail, I’ll refer you to Jason Dixon’s summary, which links to other opinions, and add only one additional objection: if this were true, there would be no “recently expired NDA”; it would be a matter of national security.

I’ll put my money where my mouth is, and post a triple bounty: Continue reading “OpenBSD IPSec backdoor allegations: triple $100 bounty”

I’m so indie, only I can understand my art

I have to stop buying those indie games that get rave reviews from “New Games Journalism” sites and are promoted on the front page of Steam and included in “mid-week madness” packages. I mean, I like indie games, and I like the idea of a cottage industry of game designers who risk everything on a crazy idea that no major studio (except Valve) would touch with a ten-foot pole simply because they have nothing to lose anyway, but seriously, you may think of yourself as the next Peter Molyneux or John Romero or Gabe Newell or David Cage, but you see, Molyneux, Romero, Newell and Cage know something you still haven’t learned: it doesn’t matter how innovative your game is, it still has to be playable. Continue reading “I’m so indie, only I can understand my art”

Mind the Gap

I don’t get it.

I’ve started reading Stephen Donaldson’s Gap cycle, and I don’t get what’s so great about it.

I don’t mind that the characters are dicks. That’s Donaldson’s thing, and I knew it before I started reading.

I do mind his writing style, which I find flat and unengaging, but I guess it’s a matter of taste.

There are two things, however, that really bother me: plot holes and bad science. Continue reading “Mind the Gap”

chkdsk considered harmful

This list of sysadmin horror stories reminded me of a story of my own:

A long, long time ago, possibly as much as fifteen years ago, I wrote a boot loader of which I’m still quite proud, even though I’ve long since lost the code. I also wrote an installer for it, naturally. The binary was very small (a few kilobytes), even though it included a command-line interface, a partitioning tool, a screen saver and a game, so instead of installing it in a separate partition, I simply installed it in the space between the MBR and the first partition, which on a DOS system in those days was on the order of 30 kB for completely idiotic reasons.

At some point during the development, inevitably, either due to a bug in the installer or incorrect command-line parameters, I managed to install the loader on top of the FAT on one of my DOS partitions. Continue reading “chkdsk considered harmful”