Plus Cloudflare steps up its campaign to secure BGP, and why you might want to trade in cron for systemd timers.

Links:

• AMD Claims World’s Fastest Per-Core Performance with New EPYC Rome 7Fx2 CPUs
• AMD EPYC 7F52 Linux Performance - AMD 7FX2 CPUs Further Increasing The Fight Against Intel Xeon Review
• Understanding RAID: How performance scales from one disk to eight
• New Cloudflare tool can tell you if your ISP has deployed BGP fixes
• Is BGP safe yet?
• RPKI - The required cryptographic upgrade to BGP routing
• Why I Prefer systemd Timers Over Cron – Thomas Stringer
• systemd/Timers - ArchWiki
• systemd.time (Time format docs)
• systemd.timer (Unit docs)

Plus why you may want to skip Nest Wifi, and our latest explorations of long range wireless protocols.

Links:

• Decoding LoRa: Realizing a Modern LPWAN with SDR — LoRa is an emerging Low Power Wide Area Network (LPWAN), a type of wireless communication technology suitable for connecting low power embedded devices over long ranges. This paper details the modulation and encoding elements that comprise the LoRa PHY, the structure of which is the result of the author’s recent blind analysis of the protocol. It also introduces grlora, an open source software defined implementation of the PHY that will empower wireless developers and security researchers to investigate this nascent protocol.
• Nest Wifi announced at Made by Google 2019 | Ars Technica — Google says that a two-piece Nest Wifi kit—one Nest Router and one Nest Point—should cover up to 3,800 square feet and 85% of homes. This claim, like most arbitrary claims of Wi-Fi coverage with no real detail, should be taken with several grains of salt.
• TP-LINK EAP series Business Wi-Fi Solution — The EAP Series Business Wi-Fi Solution incorporates EAP Series hardware, which provides a smooth, reliable wireless internet experience, and a powerful centralized management platform.
• Bloody Stupid Johnson | Discworld Wiki — Although evidently able in certain fields, Johnson is notorious for his complete inability to produce anything according to specification or common sense, or (sometimes) even the laws of physics.
• A Quick Look At EXT4 vs. ZFS Performance On Ubuntu 19.10 With An NVMe SSD — For those thinking of playing with Ubuntu 19.10's new experimental ZFS desktop install option in opting for using ZFS On Linux in place of EXT4 as the root file-system, here are some quick benchmarks looking at the out-of-the-box performance of ZFS/ZoL vs. EXT4 on Ubuntu 19.10 using a common NVMe solid-state drive.
• ubuntu/zsys: zsys daemon and client for zfs systems — It allows running multiple ZFS systems in parallel on the same machine, get automated snapshots, managing complex zfs dataset layouts separating user data from system and persistent data, and more.
• Ubuntu ZFS support in 19.10: ZFS on root · ~DidRocks — We are shipping ZFS On Linux version 0.8.1, with features like native encryption, trimming support, checkpoints, raw encrypted zfs transmissions, project accounting and quota and a lot of performance enhancements.
• Ubuntu ZFS support in 19.10: introduction · ~DidRocks — We want to support ZFS on root as an experimental installer option, initially for desktop, but keeping the layout extensible for server later on.
• A detailed look at Ubuntu’s new experimental ZFS installer | Ars Technica — If you're new to the ZFS hype train, you might wonder why a new filesystem option in an OS installer is a big deal. So here's a quick explanation: ZFS is a copy-on-write filesystem, which can take atomic snapshots of entire filesystems.

Plus some handy tools to manage your snapshots, rsync war stories, and more!

Links:

• sanoid: Policy-driven snapshot management and replication tools. — Sanoid is a policy-driven snapshot management tool for ZFS filesystems. When combined with the Linux KVM hypervisor, you can use it to make your systems functionally immortal.
• Syncoid — Sanoid also includes a replication tool, syncoid, which facilitates the asynchronous incremental replication of ZFS filesystems.
• Copy-on-write - Wikipedia
• ZFS Paper
• The Magic Behind APFS: Copy-On-Write — The brand-new Apple File System (APFS) that landed with macOS High Sierra brings a handful of important new features that rely on a technique called copy-on-write (CoW).
• Chapter 19. The Z File System (ZFS)

Plus when not to use ZFS, the surprising way your disks are lying to you, and more!

Links:

• ZFS - Ubuntu Wiki — ZFS is a combined file system and logical volume manager designed and implemented by a team at Sun Microsystems led by Jeff Bonwick and Matthew Ahrens.
• Performance tuning - OpenZFS — Make sure that you create your pools such that the vdevs have the correct alignment shift for your storage device's size. if dealing with flash media, this is going to be either 12 (4K sectors) or 13 (8K sectors).

Plus the nitty-gritty details of vectorized optimizations and kernel preemption, and our thoughts on the future of the relationship between ZFS and Linux.

Special Guest: Richard Yao.

Links:

• LinuxFest Northwest 2019 — Join a bunch of JB hosts and community celebrating the 20th anniversary!
• Choose Linux — The show that captures the excitement of discovering Linux.
• Linux 5.0: _kernel_fpu{begin,end} no longer exported — The latest kernels removed the old compatibility headers.
• ZFS On Linux Landing Workaround For Linux 5.0 Kernel Support — So while these symbols are important for SIMD vectorized checksums for ZFS in the name of performance, with Linux 5.0+ they are not going to be exported for use by non-GPL modules. ZFS On Linux developer Tony Hutter has now staged a change that would disable vector instructions on Linux 5.0+ kernels.
• Re: x86/fpu: Don't export __kernel_fpu_{begin,end}() — My tolerance for ZFS is pretty non-existant. Sun explicitly did not want their code to work on Linux, so why would we do extra work to get their code to work properly?
• The future of ZFS in FreeBSD — This state of affairs has led to a general agreement among the stakeholders that I have spoken to that it makes sense to rebase FreeBSD's ZFS on ZoL. Brian Behlendorf has graciously encouraged me to add FreeBSD support directly so that we might all have a singleshared code base.
• Dephix: Kickoff to The Future — OpenZFS has grown over the last decade, and delivering our application on Linux provides great OpenZFS support while enabling higher velocity adoption of new environments.
• The future of ZFS on Linux [zfs-discuss] — Do you realize that we don’t actually need the symbols that the kernel removed. It All they do is save/restore of register state while turning off/on preemption. Nothing stops us from doing that ourselves. It is possible to implement our own substitutes using code from either Illumos or FreeBSD or even write our own. Honestly, I am beginning to think that my attempt to compromise with mainline gave the wrong impression. I am simply tired of this behavior by them and felt like reaching out to put an end to it. In a few weeks, we will likely be running on Linux 5.0 as if those symbols had never been removed because we will almost certainly have our own substitutes for them. Having to bloat our code because mainline won’t give us access to trivial functionality is annoying, but it is not the end of the world.
• LINUX Unplugged Episode 284: Free as in Get Out
• BSD Now 279: Future of ZFS
• BSD Now 157: ZFS, The “Universal” File-system