3.0.3 images up

I’ve uploaded DragonFly 3.0.3 disk images, both ISO and IMG.  They should start appearing on a mirror site near you in the next 24 hours.  This took a while after the tagging, I know, but I wanted to make sure every one of them booted.  I didn’t on a previous release, and regretted it.

Lazy Reading for 2012/08/26

There’s certainly no theme to this week’s links.  I even manage to avoid my usual git and vim links, strangely.

Your unrelated comic link of the week: Cul De Sac.   The strip is ending due to the creator’s health issues, but what he has done is marvelous.  This is one of the few newspaper strips that is both visually interesting and often abruptly laugh out loud funny, without being patronizing.

DragonFly and GSoC 2012 wrapup

DragonFly had a successful Google Summer of Code even this year.  It marks our 5th time participating, 7th if you count  Google Code-In events.

Mihai Carabas worked on adding SMT/HT awareness to the DragonFly scheduler.   This project was very successful.  The original goal was just to take advantage of threading with the scheduler, but the benchmarks published by Mihai show in general a 5% speedup from these scheduler changes.  His work has already been committed.

Vishesh Yadav implemented an inotify interface in DragonFly.  inotify is an originally Linux-based system for monitoring files and directories for changes.  A specific use for this is an inotify-aware locate program, so that a list of file locations can be kept ‘live’.  His code for the inotify interface should be committed to DragonFly very soon.

(This was written in part for Google to use on their Open Source Blog.)

Lazy Reading for 2012/08/19

I think I’ve made it through my backlog of things to post.  For no apparent reason, I ended up with a whole bunch of ‘this vs. that’ links this week.

Your unrelated link of the week: Taipan!  I played this on the Apple ][ and loved it.  The buy-low-sell-high game is an old genre that hasn’t been used in newer games in the same fashion as roguelikes or sidescrollers.  The only recent equivalents I can think of are Drug Wars and maaaaybe Eve Online.