Keep OSNews alive by becoming a Patreon, by donating through Ko-Fi, or by buying merch!

Monthly Archive:: November 2009

Next-Generation Linux File Systems

Linux continues to innovate in the area of file systems. It supports the largest variety of file systems of any operating system. It also provides cutting-edge file system technology. Two new file systems that are making their way into Linux include the NiLFS(2) log-structured file system and the exofs object-based storage system. Discover the purpose behind these two new file systems and the advantages that they bring.

Startup Litl Launches Internet-Enabled Computer

Litl LLC launched today a Linux-based laptop design, named "Webbook". The device comes with a custom simplified interface, it can run third party web apps, and it can operate both in a laptop mode, or by bending backwards the screen, in the "easel TV-like mode". The Webbook can also connect through HDMI to an HDTV, and a remote control is sold separately. The Webbook goes in auto-maintainance mode, when in sleep. The Atom 1.6 Ghz/1 GB RAM device sells for $699. More info here and here. Videos of the UI here.

Has Palm Missed the Boat?

Most of us here like gadgets. Things with displays, LEDs, or stuff that otherwise lights up in the dark and makes cool noises. There is this one gadget I had been waiting for to come out in The Netherlands for quite a while now, but at some point a limit was reached, and today I decided to do a complete 180 and buy a competing product.

VIA Intros Nano 3000 Netbook, Notebook CPUs

"VIA has introduced out its latest Nano CPUs, pitching the new 3000 family of low-power processors at makers of thin'n'light laptops and of all-in-one desktops. The Nano 3000 series runs to six processors, clock at between 1GHz and 2GHz. They all sit on an 800MHz system bus. Four U3x00 models consume just 100mW of power when idling - the two L3xx0 Nanos consume 500mW at idle. VIA touted the new parts' support for 64-bit computing, virtualisation and the SSE 4 media processing instructions. Like past VIA processors, the new ones have on-board AES and SHA encryption engine."

Psystar Asks Judge to Rule Its Business Is Legitimate

While the Apple v. Psystar case is currently on hold until the hearing regarding the motions for a summary judgement takes place (November 12) the Psystar v. Apple case (still with me?) is only just beginning. Psystar has amended its original complaint in this second lawsuit, asking the judge to order Apple to cease calling Psystar's business "illegal", claiming it hurts the clone maker financially.

ZFS Gets Deduplication

ZFS has received built-in deduplication. "Deduplication is the process of eliminating duplicate copies of data. Dedup is generally either file-level, block-level, or byte-level. Chunks of data - files, blocks, or byte ranges - are checksummed using some hash function that uniquely identifies data with very high probability. Chunks of data are remembered in a table of some sort that maps the data's checksum to its storage location and reference count. When you store another copy of existing data, instead of allocating new space on disk, the dedup code just increments the reference count on the existing data. When data is highly replicated, which is typical of backup servers, virtual machine images, and source code repositories, deduplication can reduce space consumption not just by percentages, but by multiples."

Should ZFS Have a fsck Tool?

One of the advantages of ZFS is that it doesn't need a fsck. Replication, self-healing and scrubbing are a much better alternative. After a few years of ZFS life, can we say it was the correct decision? The reports in the mailing list are a good indicator of what happens in the real world, and it appears that once again, reality beats theory. The author of the article analyzes the implications of not having a fsck tool and tries to explain why he thinks Sun will add one at some point.

Nokia Exec Talks Ovi Platform

CNet interviews Niklas Savander, executive VP of Services at Nokia, to find out about the future of the Ovi store and Nokia's plans to steal back market share in America. He candidly admits to Nokia's past shortfallings, such as lack of integration between services, poor user experience, and Nokia's long lack of focus on the American market, and hints at what it is doing to rectify them, including the planned launch of a co-branded AT&T/Ovi app store.

Sheepdog: Distributed Storage Management for qemu/kvm

"Sheepdog is a new third party open source project around kvm providing distributed storage management features. Sheepdog provides high availability to kvm guests by providing block level storage volumes to virtual machines similar to Amazon EBS (Elastic Block Storage). In fact one of the items on the sheepdog project todo list is to support the Amazon EBS API. Sheepdog is designed to scale to hundreds of nodes. You can think of this technique as striping your virtual disk data across multiple nodes similar to what raid does. The project is still very early in its development cycle but already provides basic functionality."