buildworld needed

Because of a commit at 2004/04/29 03:06:41 PDT, your next upgrade will need a buildworld – make quickworld won’t catch it. This was helpfully noted by David Rhodus.

Athlon P4/Xeon users take note

If you have an Athlon or Xeon processor, go into usr/src/test/sysperf, do make, and the resulting /tmp/mem1 program will probably give interesting results, which you can then post to the kernel mailing list. A caveat from Matt Dillon:

“Note however that you have to manually edit which copy tests it does since it bus fault if you try to run the XMM (SSE2) test on a machine without SSE2 :-)”

quick MMX fix

If you updated your kernel today and you are having wierd graphical issues or crashing, put this in /boot/loader.conf:

kern.mmxopt=0

The issue should be fixed very soon.

Quietly furious activity

It’s been very quiet, but that’s because people are really, really busy working on DragonFly features. Here’s a roundup:

– Devon H. O’Dell and others are still working on the installer, promtped by Hiten Pandya. The code for this is available via cvsweb, including the very interesting design notes. (It has diagrams, so it must be good.)

– Hiten Pandya and Joerg Sonnenberger are updating the device subsystem to match FreeBSD 5.x. (I don’t have a lot of details on this; they’re busy!)

– Matt Dillon is writing a paper with FreeBSD’s Alan Cox detailing the performance improvements of certain pipe optimizations; he’s been doing various benchmarks for data. He’s also been working on AMD64-specific code, which he’s planning to commit soon.

– I may as well toss this in too: Jeffrey Hsu has been quietly and steadily changing the networking system. I don’t often mention his patches because he’s working at a level that’s quite beyond my ability to summarize.

Lots of tasks

Looking for things to do? Here’s Hiten Pandya’s list of possible merges from FreeBSD. There’s a lot of tasks there of varying length and difficulty, so if you feel like trying something out, go for it and post your patch to the dragonfly.submit list.

stable and release

Jonathon McKitrick asked about “last known stable” tags, and the June release date for 1.0. Matt Dillon replied that a known stable tag will appear once the networking code is stable, and that a late June release is still planned