OK, madwifi has been pissing me off. For quite some time, ever since I got the card really. The madwifi-driver ebuild at first was good and reliable. But for a while the quality has been degrading somewhat, especially as wpa_supplicant now requries specific madwifi headers. And the latest batch in portage isn’t exactly compatible. I also downloaded a CVS snapshop and tried that out. Oh dear, bad mojo! They now require you to run a special tool to create a friggin wireless interface!
After yesterdays blog, g2boojum asked if it would be faster to actually use the tsort C binary if available. My response was that I would expect it to be faster, but not by much as most of the work is making the dependancy tree to start with. Being the silly sort I am I decided to back myself up with benchmarks! :)
C tsort stopping
real 0m0.343s user 0m0.196s sys 0m0.
A few people say that our network scripts are slow. Well, they were damn slow when 1.11 first hit portage. :( Stopping is always the slowest as every module is loaded and evaluated. As we add more modules to do more fancy networking tricks, we get slower and slower. So over time we’ve added a few speed ups.
First, we cached a lot of repeatedly called functions (mainly _provides, _before and _after).
After finding out that a localmount bug was actually a kernel issue, I also noticed that after creating a reiserfs root my prism54 card loaded by itself (when booting onto reiserfs). “That’s odd” I thought as it hadn’t done that for a long time and I’d attributed it starting/not starting to udev issues.When booting ext3, it loads the prism54 driver just fine, but doesn’t do anything else- not even call net.
I’ve been a long time user and trumpet blower for dnsmasq which is a DNS forwarder and DHCP server. It’s perfect for LAN’s as it’s small, light and fast especially when compared against the usual DHCP + BIND combo from ISC. What’s more, it’s very easy to configure and uses the standard /etc/hosts file to serve static DNS.However, it’s not without its negative points as I discovered when setting up my new domain DNS server so I can serve IPv6 and redirect $familymember.
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