Yes Linus Torvalds announced the release of the 2.6.25 kernel today. I’ve been trying to confirm whether the TASK_KILLABLE patches have been included. It has been mentioned in the comments of the LWM article announcing the 2.6.25 release but the Kernel Newbies 2.6.25 page only lists:

“softlockup: automatically detect hung TASK_UNINTERRUPTIBLE tasks”

Honestly after reading about the other big changes this is the one that has the most effect on my work. The addition of LatencyTop support should help improve desktops running Linux and I look forward to playing with it. But most of the other changes do not address issues that I am experiencing while the TASK_KILLABLE patches most certainly do. I will have to do more research on the state of these patches; perhaps they don’t seem like a big deal to other people but I’m surprised that such an important change wouldn’t be mentioned.

I was interested in trying to determine how many packages were installed from universe on the servers I manage. Luckily I came across a helpful discussion titled list installed Universe packages which suggested this command:

• comm -12 <(apt-cache dumpavail | grep-dctrl -nsPackage -FSection universe/ |sort) <(dpkg --get-selections | awk '$2 == "install" { print $1 }' |sort)

To get the command to work I had to install the package dctrl-tools (for the grep-dctrl command):

• sudo apt-get install dctrl-tools

After that it worked pretty well and can easily be adapted to search for other sections. It turns out that my servers use many packages from universe but none from restricted or multiverse, which is nice.

A year or so ago I migrated from cfengine to puppet. Lately I've been less than pleased with puppet. It has issues with using too much memory (especially when recursing directories with many files), it recently broke on any directory string ending in a slash, and version 0.24.4 clients are not compatible with servers before 0.24.4. I took a look around but the landscape hasn't changed much. I suspect bcfg2 might use less resources but I really dislike the idea of using XML configuration files. I'm not sure puppet's syntax is the best either but at least it's relatively concise and powerful. And I'm not going back to cfengine. So I guess puppet remains the best option, but that may not be saying much.

Ok, although I think the name is terrible (try using a search engine to find any information about “Discount”), the project seems pretty cool. Though I have my gripes with Markdown it is well suited for a number of applications:

• discount (markdown in C) announcement

I have tended to setup Xen systems with LVM storage due to the performance increases I’ve observed compared to file-based storage. Recently I’ve decided to largely transition to file-based storage primarily for the increase in manageability that file-based virtual machine images provides. Files are much easier to manipulate for backups, migrating to other systems, and similar tasks. While I will still use LVM in certain situations I think the file-based images is a better choice until one runs into performance bottlenecks. Even at that point there may be other alternatives available.

Just a few days ago Passenger was released in order to better integrate Rails with Apache. I decided to give it a try as I see it being very useful to simplify Rails deployments. I was also interested in testing the performance compared to nginx and mongrel.