April 2009 – DragonFly BSD Digest

I had mentioned the new malloc in DragonFly before, but Matthew Dillon has a nice explanation of its performance improvements and the relationship to the existing slab allocator.

Colin Adams has a DragonFly system up and running, and he's posting about dragonflies - the insect variety.

Hasso Tepper, who has been working very hard on pkgsrc on DragonFly, has a few strange pkgsrc issues he'd like help on. Anyone have ideas? (Follow the thread to see what's been done so far.)

The 2.2.1 release is on its way out to mirrors now. Simon 'corecode' Schubert has kindly put together a list of the changes in this new version.

Naoya Sugioka has the latest version of his kqemu patch; it fixes some issues noted by Johannes Hofman. It may end up in the base system.

Sepherosa Ziehau has added 'ifpoll', a feature similar to polling(4). It has to be enabled via a kernel option and so far is only enabled for emx(4); read his commit message for more details.

Sdävtaker posted a note about BSDDay, a BSD convention happening in Argentina, on the 29th and 30th of May. There's also a poster. (PDF)

NetBSD now has a Projects Blog and a Twitter account. I'm not taking credit for the idea, but I do note a definite similarity between that and the DragonFly Digest, to which I say: quick, someone do this for FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD! More attention to all the BSD work being done is positive.

Hasso Tepper spotted a tty problem that caused a panic in kdesu; Matthew Dillon committed a fix which means the release is delayed until tomorrow. (Thanks, Lazarus, for catching it first)

Make Hasso Tepper's life a bit easier and take heed of this list: Maintaining stuff in pkgsrc. Edit: Meant to publish this a bit ago; missed it. Sorry!

Bring in money and then take it out again. It's conceivable that Impi Linux would have fizzled on its own, being one of a zillion Linux distributions out there, but becoming a commercial product seems to put different, and tougher, contstrictions on any open source project.

The 2.2.1 release of DragonFly, rounding up changes since the release (I don't have a list), should be tomorrow.

Mashing together to make one post: FreeBSD-SA-09:05.telnet and FreeBSD-SA-09:07.libc have been fixed in DragonFly. These PC-BSD 7.1 vs. Kubuntu 9.04 Benchmarks are interesting but not that conclusive - different versions of gcc were used. (thanks J. Kanowitz) Here's a different comparison of performance inside a VM from Ivan Voras.

Naoya Sugioka has kqemu working with the intended performance improvements; please test if you use qemu. (Johannes Hofmann has done some initial tests.)

Hasso Tepper has lang/gcc3 working in DragonFly 2.3, which means that we could potentially drop the version of gcc3 in contrib/ after the 2.4 release. He asks for other testers, please. This would have the nice side effect of speeding up buildworld tremendously, as gcc3 and gcc4 get rebuilt each time.

Spotted by trevorjk in EFNet #dragonflybsd: Mono from pkgsrc now compiles on DragonFly.

Thanks to Stathis Kamperis, it is now possible to build DragonFly 2.2 on a DragonFly 2.3 system, if for some reason you need to move to a system from before the recent libc changes.
Matthew Dillon has replaced the existing BSD malloc with a port of the slab allocator, which makes malloc() faster, with minor benefits for a buildworld.
Matthew Dillon also has a patch for people wanting to look for the elusive 'file-missing-in-directory-listing' Hammer bug. Caveat Emptor.

There's a new @Play column focusing on more of the entries at the Seven Day RogueLike competition. I mention this because roguelikes have been around on Unix-ish systems forever, some of these may work on DragonFly, and because they are much more complex and interesting than I would have thought possible.

Murray Stokely very kindly passed me a link to his summary of the 8 videos now online showing presentations from the recent 2009 DCBSDCon. Of particular interest is Robert Luciani's talk about M:N threading in DragonFly. Yes, that's the same Robert Luciani who is participating in Summer of Code with DragonFly to profile kernel contention on multiprocessor systems.

There's 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently. Student: Alexander Hornung Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD Mentor: joe talbott Student: Dan Chis Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications Mentor: schubert simon Student: robert luciani Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems Mentor: Samuel Greear Student: Jordan Gordeev Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly Mentor: Matthew Dillon Student: efstathios kamperis Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit Mentor: hasso tepper (announcement here)