Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added his patch to allow separate volume control for each application. Also, Hasso Tepper has produced a patch for sound that includes changes taken from FreeBSD 6, which improves device support.
pkgsrc has a temporary freeze coming up, where only fixes will be committed in preparation for the 2007Q2 branch, for release this Saturday, June 16th. (No link, cause netbsd.org is apparently unreachable for me right now.)
Matthew Dillon asks that 1.9 users test using USB memory devices; he’s recently committed a large number of fixes related to physically removing mounted USB drives. Also, automatically mounting reconnected drives is a small, easy project enabled by this recent work. (See linked article for details.)
Hey look! netbsd.org has been redesigned.
NATA, the ‘new ATA’ disk system, will be in the next release of DragonFly, but it will still be called ‘NATA’, not renamed to ‘ATA’. Keep this in mind when eventually updating with a custom kernel file.
Do you have a leaf.dragonflybsd.org account? Now is a good time to clean it up.
Jeremy C. Reed has updated the wiki with a (long!) list of the new technologies that have arrived in DragonFly since branching from FreeBSD.
Matthew Dillon, while investigating a separate problem, ended up improving the separation between CPUs in a multiprocessor system. The Big Giant Lock is still there, but it’s a move in the right direction.
elekktretterr@exemail.com.au is offering $50 Austrailian dollars ($35 USD) to whomever can make net-snmp work. He needs it!
“Yair K” sent along a note mentioning that, as described on the OpenSolaris forums, 4Front Technologies (also involved with XMMS) is making their OpenSound system open source as of June 14th.
OpenSound was previously available for DragonFly, though support for it was quietly dropped probably around the same time 4Front stopped supporting FreeBSD 4. In any case, it is possible it could go into contrib/ now, if it has benefits – hopefully they will make it available under a more BSD-style license.
Network driver code has been shared between the BSDs a great deal lately, with a flowering of available drivers and support. Having a shared sound model too would also lead to benefits greater than the sum of its parts.
For once, I remembered to check up on BSDTalk and see what was new: A talk with Rick Macklem, specifically about NFSv4.
Matthew Dillon wrote a long message on how things are progressing with DragonFly; some projects like improved SMP support and 64-bit processing are almost ready for prime time, and just need someone to step up and complete them. The track record so far for DragonFly has been astoundingly stable; major changes in threading and process management have gone into the tree and it’s happened completely without destabilizing the system – e.g. it’s been safe even to run bleeding-edge code.
Also: the upcoming release will be 1.10, and hopefully GCC4.x can be made the default by the time 2.0 arrives.
Matthew Dillon wrote up two notes – one describing how he launches remote ssh sessions in an xterm under FVWM2, and another on handling TCP timeouts using NAT.
From the DragonFly mailing lists: Matthew Dillon posted a list of what will and won’t be in the next release. Rahul Siddharthan pointed out that there hasn’t been much user-visible improvement since FreeBSD-4, speaking specifically about 64-bit processors and SMP. Steve O’Hara-Smith added some less well known benefits we already have, while Michael Talon described the speed boost a 64-bit operating system gives. Matthew Dillon said “someone just needs to do it“. I daresay the conversation is not over.
Matthew Dillon was finally able to reproduce the problems some people with older ATA chipsets would have with the new ATA code; he made some subsequent fixes (working late) along with Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, and it seems the ATA problems are fixed.
Alexander Motin wrote to the kernel@ mailing list about netgraph in DragonFly; it was getting difficult for him to maintain compatibility with mpd4 in the FreeBSD-4 style netgraph in DragonFly and also support netgraph in FreeBSD. Matthew Dillon said “Don’t wait up“. Anyone feel like updating netgraph? It’s probably not easy.
Preview, the version of DragonFly that is not-quite-bleeding-edge, has been updated so that everyone can try the latest version of NATA and virtual kernels.
We’re reaching the decision point where the new ATA system (disk system ported from FreeBSD, without GEOM) either should or should not be set as default for the next release. Give it a try if you are running something later than 1.8.2, and report any issues.