A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The venerable (from 1979!) program, lpr, has been superseded by CUPS in many installations. Francois Tigeot suggested removing it, but it’s still directly usable in specific situations and easier to just shift out of the way. It’s staying, but it’s interesting to see how it still gets used.
Update: Predrag Punosevac has descriptions of the various tools involved.
Multiple transmission queues are possible for the mxge(4) driver; I’m mentioning it because Sepherosa Ziehau’s post about this describes the exact tunables to configure this.
I’m planning to branch DragonFly 3.6 this weekend. The actual release will come 2 weeks later. (Ignore what I wrote about a dports installer/image.)
BSDNow has Episode 8 out, containing an interview with Antti Kantee, a number of BSD news items (including some I missed entirely), and if you couldn’t tell from the purposefully misspelled title, a conversation about Tor and BSD.
Matthew Dillon wrote a roundup post summarizing all the changes he’s made to DragonFly to improve SMP performance in the last few weeks. He’s removed almost all contention from DragonFly. This means better performance, scaling upward depending on the number of processors.
‘monster’, the system that builds all 20,000 items in dports, can complete the run in 15 hours. Compare this to the 2 weeks it used to take me to build the 12,000 packages in pkgsrc. This is admittedly on different hardware and different packaging systems, but it gives a sense of the scale of the improvement.
Joris Giovannangeli, who worked on porting Capsicum to DragonFly for Summer of Code 2013, is continuing his work. He’s posted a detailed note on how to do capability management in a new way, with it retaining compatibility with FreeBSD’s capsicum implementation.
Whee!
Your unrelated link of the week: Deep into Youtube, the top-rated films. You may want to turn your volume down, and make sure nobody is around. Not for NSFW content, but because some of those films are so confusing that it’s impossible to explain to someone else why you are watching them. (via) There’s some Nico Nico Douga-sourced stuff in there, which I thought I’ve mentioned before, but I can’t find it now. Why do I even know these things?
Once again, doing this at the last minute:
The ‘poweroff’ command, the equivalent of ‘halt -p’, has been added based on a suggestion from Robin Hahling.
Matthew Dillon has gone after reducing contention and improving SMP performance as vigorously as possible, using dports builds on a 48-processor machine as a test. The machine’s building more than 1000 packages an hour, last I saw on IRC.
This has nothing really to do with DragonFly. I’m hiring a report developer for work. Here’s the Craigslist job posting. I consider it very unlikely that there’s a local reader of this blog that also has the right skills, but what the heck.
John Marino has updated ldns and drill to version 1.6.16.
Chris Turner was curious about clock skew when running under a VM, and Sepherosa Ziehau very kindly explained the different types of internal clock for DragonFly, and how to control them – a topic I’ve never understood deeply.
Whee!
Your unrelated link of the week: Here’s a weird coincidence. I was looking at this list of pixelated iconic album covers. The #3 item is “Trout Mask Replica”, from Captain Beefheart and the Magic Band. I scanned that specific image back in 1994, on a Mac IIsi in my college lab. For whatever reason, I’ve seen copies of my scan (color corrected much better than I did) many times since. I know I’m not hallucinating because I still have the record, with the same wear pattern on the album cover. It’s odd to see a 20-year-old copy of a 40-year-old album scan you did just pop up out of nowhere.
I am doing this one at the last minute. I had all the articles noted, but normally I build this post over the course of the week.
BSDNow episode 7 is out, with jails as a feature among a number of topics.
The October episode of BSD Magazine is out. I haven’t seen it in their RSS feed yet (is it running?), but noticed it here.
Matthew Dillon was using poudriere, the dports build tool, on a 48-core system. Poudriere was building all 20,000+ dports, so the machine was quite busy. He decided to get rid of as much contention as possible, and he’s listed all the ways DragonFly’s been streamlined by these efforts. We need to revisit some of our previous benchmarks…
The Large Installation System Administration 2013 conference has been announced for is coming up on November 3-8, in Washington, D.C. There’s training and speakers and all sorts of stuff, and maybe even a working government in that town by that point.
There is a search plugin for Mozilla that searches DragonFly man pages. (Thanks Samuel Greear)