No they don't. There's the main kernel debugging options: WITNESS, which tracks kernel locking ordering, and INVARIANTS, which adds in a lot of asserts to validate the integrity of various data structures. libc wise there's MALLOC_PRODUCTION, which turns off a bunch of debugging things in jemalloc.

None of these are ever on unless you're running FreeBSD -CURRENT (currently the 8 series) or otherwise make a custom build where you've explictly turned them on; 7-BETA and 7-RC's are built with the same options as release builds. You'll *know* when someone benchmarks a system with them on because they'll be *significantly* slower.

You're probably thinking of LLVM. It does have a gcc front-end, so can be used to compile most things gcc can.

There's another one or two, but LLVM's probably the only serious contender against gcc.

Beta and RC should be pretty much as performant as the final release; there's no magical change in CFLAGS or debugging options for a release.

On CURRENT, yes, there's WITNESS and INVARIANTS which drastically reduce performance because it's constantly checking every locking operation to make sure things are happening in the right order, verifying kernel data structures and so forth. This doesn't apply to STABLE, PRERELEASE, BETA or RC releases.

ZFS in recent Solaris Nevada and FreeBSD CURRENT supports a feature called L2ARC; Level-2 Advanced Replacement Cache. This is basically the ZFS filesystem/metadata cache, backed by so-called cache devices.

So, you can get your 32GB SSD, shove it in front of your n-TB ZFS array, and it'll use it to help accelerate random reads. 32GB of storage is a bit feeble, but 32GB of cache.. that's rather compelling, especially if your storage is otherwise backed by cheap and cheerful 7200RPM disks.

50-60km up, the atmosphere of Venus is roughly at Earth-normal temperature and pressure. Bog standard air is a lifting gas there too, being less dense.

Yup, I current have.. er, 8*15 + 2 = 122 tabs open in Opera. I find them easier to manage than temporary bookmarks.

And yes, I use RSS. In a tab. And I open things from it.. in more tabs ;)

Original Install Date: 22/07/2005, 11:39:35
Hotfix(s): 340 Hotfix(s) Installed.

Hibernate works fine for me, both with the 3 or 4 nVidia graphics cards this system's been through and my current ATI, plus two different TV cards, three sound cards and two SATA cards. Granted it's not perfect, but it normally lasts about a fortnight of hibernating once a day.

Maybe it's because I spent more on a Tyan motherboard.. but then again, Hibernate worked fine on my last two Gigabyte motherboards too.

Um, well, good for you if that's all you need, and Sun will surely be happy to sell you something appropriate for that too, but for some of us, we kind of need that 2TB to do more than 300 IOPS.

Meh, I've got a PS3, I still do the vast majority of gaming on a PC.

Consoles have far smaller catalogs, the games are more expensive, they're generally shallower, they look worse, they have poorer controls, and many of the titles worth having are also available on the PC. Certain classes of game are practically non-existant since they don't fit the console demographics or control systems or hardware limitations.

There's little to no freeware, no modding, and no publishing freedom since everything has to be vetted by one vendor. That's all a pretty hefty price for a marginally higher probability of things Just Working.

FreeBSD's UFS2 supports snapshots too, though they're not as effecient as you might like.

I'm pretty sure NTFS supports snapshots in the form of the volume shadow copy service, but they're not as clearly exposed to the user.

dd_rescue > conv=noerror. It'll read in big blocks and when one fails, it'll drop the block size and retry, so you don't lose a 128k chunk when there's only one unreadable 512 byte sector.

• Sun X4240, cheap from third party reseller not necessarily in the best of configurations: ~£2700.
• 2 cheap and cheerful SSD's for ARC second level cache: £300. £1200 if you want ones with decent write performance.
• 14*146GB 2.5" 10kRPM SAS disks: £2100.

Even if you put it together and test it using slave labour, you're not getting much change from $11k.

Sure, you could just plonk three 1.5T Seagates in there, shove a RAIDZ over it and call it a day, and that would be fine for some uses, but it's not really something you buy a storage appliance for, is it?

Second level ARC is standard in recent ZFS; you could just plonk some X25-M's in your X4240, attach a disk shelf to it, configure ZFS to use the SSD's as secondary ARC for it, and pretty much have something like what Sun are selling.

You know, just with less vendor support, and more effort involved in building, configuring, tuning and testing. If you come out of it with change from $10k, you probably earned it with the effort you put in.

You forgot the SSD's for ZFS secondary ARC cache. Oh, and the server.

But I thought "People 'can't wait for ID cards'":

Someone should tell Jacqui that the people who stand to make lots of money from producing ID cards for the government wanting it to be done sooner don't count as a representative sample of the British public.