Build report for pkgsrc

For the curious, I recently sent a bulk build report for pkgsrc-2011Q4 to the lists.  Other than ruby-193 (which is fixed in pkgsrc HEAD thanks to John Marino), we’re looking pretty good!  I’m curious if KDE or Gnome could actually get installed via binary; that’s sort of an ultimate goal due to the number of packages involved.

Speaking of Ruby, the default in pkgsrc may change soon, along with some of the involved Rails packages.

Booting in a VM tip

If you’re trying DragonFly 3 in a virtual machine, you may have noticed some issues in booting in (for instance) Qemu.  Sepherosa Ziehau committed a change that sets the sysctl hw.ioapic_enable to 0 in virtual environments.  It can always be turned back on, but the recent MSI/MSI-X improvements seem to cause trouble in some virtual environment.  You can also set that tunable at boot to get an initial install going.

(I haven’t had trouble in Virtualbox or VMWare, so you may or may not need this.)

Benchmarks for DragonFly 3.0

As several people have told me, there’s benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 vs. 2.10, available on Phoronix.   CPU performance shows a significant improvement, in tests that actually test it.   (I’d think a file compression test would be disk-limited, for instance.)   Disk performance isn’t as great, but that may be in part because Hammer no longer will starve reading to benefit writing; that makes benchmarks look worse but improves real-world interactivity.  I’m sure there’s more quibbling to do, since it’s lies, damn lies benchmarks.

GNU hash tables added

Another “first BSD to try it” feature: GNU hash table support has been added by John Marino.  These apparently speed up symbol searching during program startup, so it should improve large program startup time.  Think KDE or Open Office, though I don’t have numbers to back it up.

Lazy Reading for 2012/03/11

This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text.  I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute.  Thanks, Internet!  It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.

Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!

Missed notes: JDK1.6, isp(4), PCI ids

I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:

“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it.  I don’t know if it still applies.

Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.

Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs.  Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.