pipe(2) is now MPSAFE, meaning it can take advantage of multiple processors without the Giant Lock. Matthew Dillon published some before-and-after stats in his commit.
(This is off-topic) The National Center for the History of Electronic Games has opened at a museum in my town. They are looking for donations, so if you have old game equipment around that you want to see get a second life, contact them.
The collection there is already huge (15K games), and visitors get to play whatever games they have on display. In my last visit, I played the arcade versions of Gauntlet, the standing and sitting versions of Star Wars, and Battlezone. It was awesome in a way that may only be apparent to people born before 1985 or so.
Matt Trout noticed I had linked to one of his articles, and kindly sent along two more good ones on open source topics: Respect is Per Community and You Aren’t Good Enough (video). The video is something I can certainly get behind: it’s easier to contribute to open source than you think.
Alexander Polakov has ported the ae(4) network driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; it’s committed now. This device is common in some (many?) Asus Eee devices.
The kernel option PCI_MAP_FIXUP has been removed as of July 11th; if you’re upgrading past that point, make sure to remove that option.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org has a fresh set of pkgsrc-current binary packages for 2.2.1 located at http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages/DragonFly-2.2/pkgsrc-current/. I’ll start a pkgsrc-2009Q2 build momentarily – the pkgsrc-2009Q2 build will become ‘stable’.
The short summary: everyone passed. Yay!
5 weeks to finish!
Colin Perceval has a good idea: if your employer uses open source code, show your appreciation to the developer(s) with some sort of freebie. (Via.) It’s much easier to prise a mug or t-shirt from a marketing department than to get money from a finance department.
The in-progress code for the Summer of Code project ‘DragonFly on AMD64’ has been imported; you can now build for SMP on AMD64, and complete a installworld/buildworld, natively. Modules don’t (yet) compile…
Virtual kernels are now SMP by default on DragonFly, even if you don’t have multiple processors/cores.
Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to version 1.0.0 and tcpdump to 4.0.0. (tcpdump site) I’d guarantee that having at least a passing familiarity with tcpdump will eventually, someday, solve an otherwise intractable problem for you.
Threading libraries libc_r and libthread_xu have been synchronized by Hasso Tepper; this shouldn’t cause noticeable issues. The potential issues he mentions for pkgsrc appear fixed, as I haven’t had any significant trouble (from that, at least) during bulk builds.
Alex Hornung is looking for suggestions on the userland tool(s) for his devfs project. This is a Google Summer of Code project, and I’m a bit late posting this, so hurry if you want to get your two cents in.
The binary pkgsrc packages I had on avalon.dragonflybsd.org for 2.3.1 are removed; I had mixed an old and new libc on the build system. (Sorry!) I’ll have new ones based on pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release very soon.
There’s going to be a lot of kernel structure changes this week, as Matthew Dillon works on making more system parts multiprocessor-safe. Rebuild everything including your kernel, if you’re running bleeding edge DragonFly.
EuroBSDCon 2009 is happening the 18th through 20th of September, in Cambridge, UK. There’s usually at least 2-3 DragonFly folks showing up at these – anyone planning to go?
Sascha Wildner has made it possible to include “other” compilers (meaning not GCC) in DragonFly’s build system. His post has additional details.
If you’re a student or mentor for Google Summer of Code, all midterm surveys have to be done by tomorrow, the 13th, at 12:00 PDT. Please do it if you haven’t – payment depends on participation.
The hammer command now has an ‘info’ option, which gives a great deal of information on your Hammer drives, thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez. (Committed)