A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I have some pkgsrc-2011Q3 builds done, for x86_64 and i386. I performed them on DragonFly 2.11, but they should work fine for 2.12/2.13. They’re uploading to the pkgsrc-2011Q3 folder on mirror-master, so you’ll need to set PKG_PATH correctly to use them via pkg_radd.
PKG_PATH=http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/packages/x86_64/DragonFly-2.13/stable/
The x86_64 package upload is done, and I anticipate the i386 one will be done within the next 24 hours.
Go, look at the BSDday Argentina 2011 site. Follow the appropriate link for the languages you understand – it’s a console simulation! (via)
I did not realize this, but MMC/SD cards are not supported in the default DragonFly kernel. Or at least, they weren’t until now. (also committed to 2.12)
Update: PCI-based MMC/SD readers, specifically. USB ones were already recognized as umass devices.
They aren’t really release candidates per se, just “images I built from the 2.12 branch”, but they are available for testing.
There’s only two commits, already in DragonFly-current, to add to 2.12 before it’s clear of all listed release requirements. And maybe binary package builds… which I’m about 2/3 of the way through.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the people behind UNIX and the C language, has died. (via skullY on #dragonflybsd on EFNet) Look at his Bell Labs web page for some details on his history. The death of Steve Jobs will get a lot of media attention, but I’d argue that Ritchie affected more computers in far more ways.
I got mine the other day, and here’s someone else’s.
It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on hardware support being split up per-CPU, judging by this commit – one of many, recently.
Some newer laptops have Intel integrated video chipsets that require GEM/KMS to work well; they are supported by the vesa driver in X, but performance isn’t great. Johannes Hofmann found this out the hard way. GEM/KMS support is on the way for various BSDs, but it’s not here yet. Just be aware of this if shopping for a new laptop in the next little while…
Among other changes to pkgin 0.5 (available in pkgsrc-wip but not pkgsrc-2011Q3), it now notices if you need a newer pkg_install because you’ve shifted to a more recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, and grabs the appropriate binary package to fix that. Thanks, iMil!
Getting close to 2.12 release…
User ‘Zenny’ asked questions about setting up a server similar to ones described in this presentation, except using DragonFly and Hammer. Most of it is possible now, going by the thread.
Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.
There’s only one multiprocessing bottleneck left in DragonFly: vm_token. Matthew Dillon’s working on removing it, and he’s been testing his initial results on a 4-core machine and a 48-core machine, using heavily parallelized buildworlds to test concurrency. He’s posted the results, showing an initial speedup of up to 30%. This definitely isn’t going to make it into 2.12, but it’s looking good already. Keep in mind these are improvements on top of the performance graphed here yesterday.
Technology Innovation Management Review, the replacement for the Open Source Business Resource, has its first issue out. There’s still an open source focus, despite the name change.
Venkatesh Srinivas sent along a graph of his nmalloc testing that shows mysql threading performance on DragonFly, from slightly over a year ago. Both graphs were done on a 4-core system, though I don’t know if the specs are comparable, so the curve is important. Look at the just-posted curve for comparison. That’s how much things have improved.
In fact, here’s a cheesy overlay, cropping the more recent results and laying the old ones on top of it. The black lines are the year-ago performance, and the colored lines are the performance now.
Samuel Greear has graphed out the performance of both MySQL and Postgres on DragonFly 2.12 as you add threads. There’s a very nice correlation on performance and number of cores. For comparison, there’s this old test from 2007 which shows uniprocessor performance to be good but not improved by adding cores. The tests were on completely different hardware, so the actual curve of the graph is the telling point.
As he points out in his post, excellent multiprocessor performance is arriving on DragonFly, without any catastrophic shifts or destabilizing changes.
The 2.12 branching generated a list of every DragonFly commit since 2.10, grouped by committer. Good to browse through. Try to ignore the part where it shows the measly 4 things I did, with poorly constructed commit messages.
You’ll see Steve Jobs memorials all over the place for the next few days, but here’s something that won’t get mentioned much: He probably is responsible for putting UNIX – real, BSD-based UNIX – in the hands of more people than anyone else, ever.
It’s not the 2.12 release yet – just the initial branch of 2.12. This will become the release version of 2.12 in a few weeks.
