Al Hoang

November 29, 2008

Understanding what an L2ARC is

Filed under: geek, solaris, tech, unix — hoanga @ 10:13 am

I’ve been silently scanning some Solaris blogs and skimming some of the appropriate websites for documentation on some of the more interesting features of Solaris for awhile now. One thing that requires time to adjust to is the number of acronyms that the Solaris community has to describe their technologies. One of these is called L2ARC.

At first I thought it was some hardware device however after a bit more searching it turns out that it is part of the ZFS technology suite. L2ARC stands for second level ARC where ARC is a read cache system for ZFS that uses a system´s main memory for holding the cache. While ARC uses the hardware´s main memory, L2ARC is designed to take advantage of faster I/O media such as SSD devices to provide faster read throughput than what a typical hard drive can offer.

Brendan Gregg has an excellent overview explaining what the L2ARC is and some of the benefits it can give in accelerating random reads.

Getting KDE 4.1.0 on a Fedora 8 machine when KDE 3 is already there

Filed under: fixes, gripe, linux, stupid — hoanga @ 9:32 am

According to the Fedora FAQ one should be able to update with just this

sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing groupupdate "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

However when I did, I ran into some icons from packages kdepim-3.5.9 and kdegraphics-4.1.0 conflicting with packages crystalsvg-icon-theme and libkipi. Here is a log…

  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/48x48/apps/kpalmdoc.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_contacts.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_date.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_journal.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_mail.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_news.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_notes.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_summary.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_summary_green.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/kontact_todo.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/crystalsvg/64x64/actions/rss_tag.png from install of kdepim-3.5.9-10.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package crystalsvg-icon-theme-4.0.4-1.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/16x16/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/22x22/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/32x32/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386
  file /usr/share/icons/hicolor/48x48/apps/kipi.png from install of kdegraphics-4.1.0-3.fc9.i386 conflicts with file from package libkipi-0.1.5-4.fc9.i386

Error Summary
-------------

I tried deleting these packages manually but that led into an even deeper’s rats nest of dependency hell. So one thing I tried was

$ sudo yum groupremove "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing groupinstall  "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

However I still got conflcts so ran

$ sudo yum remove libkipi
$ sudo yum remove crystalsvg-icon-theme
$ sudo yum --enablerepo=updates-testing groupupdate  "KDE (K Desktop Environment)"

And finally I have got KDE 4.1.0 to install in way too many steps.

I can’t get no satisfying manpages

Filed under: gripe, solaris, stupid — hoanga @ 9:29 am

It seems that with most default UNIX-like installations outside of FreeBSD just include craptastic manpages.

This really puts a dent in RTFM. In Linux-land this has been a serious PITA for years (Yes, I know how to hunt around for the packages to install the manpages in Redhat-ish and Debian lang but it is still an irritation). It seems my forays with OpenSolaris mirror the fun of Linux. Ah well..

$  man ps
Reformatting page.  Please Wait... done

Miscellaneous                                          missing(x)

     missing - Missing Manual Page

DESCRIPTION
     Unfortunately, this OpenSolaris Developer Preview  does  not
     include  the  manual  page you are looking for.  We're sorry
     and hope to improve upon this situation in future releases.

     Online versions  of  many  manual  pages  are  available  at
     http://docs.sun.com/app/docs/coll/40.17.

SunOS 5.11            Last change: 07/10/25

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