A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Since there’s a newer set of dports binary packages uploaded, I thought I’d spend my weekend upgrading, to catch up.
‘pkg upgrade’
And that was it. Well, not really. I had to dump and restore my Postgres databases, cause of the switch from 9.0 to 9.2 as default. I had to build php5 from source to get the Apache module. Those two things together took longer than the entire download and upgrade of the rest of my system – some ~200 packages?
Michael W. Lucas wrote a blog post about pkgng and Ansible on FreeBSD. Will it work on DragonFly? We already have pkgng on DragonFly in the form of dports, and Ansible… might work? Please, someone try.
So many links came up recently that I had already finished this week’s entry when last week’s Lazy Reading was posted.
Your unrelated link of the week: Release the Kraken!
In part of a long thread about dports packages on the users@ list, Matthew Dillon notes that a new set of packages for i386 and x86_64, for 3.4 and for “3.6” (meaning bleeding-edge DragonFly, even though that’s numbered 3.5) is mostly uploaded. He also notes that a Haswell-processor-based blade server for DragonFly is in the works, so much of the dragonflybsd.org infrastructure is going to move from his house to a datacenter, with the benefits that provides. It’ll also help automate binary package building.
Sepherosa Ziehau added SO_REUSEPORT to DragonFly. I don’t know how the mechanism works, because he didn’t include a description, but he did include a explanation of just how much it reduces CPU usage during as-high-as-physically-possible network load. He even wrote tools to test it more heavily.
Here’s what jumped out at me from reading source change mailing lists:
I’m going to have to set a specific day of the week aside for these.
The Observe, Hack, Make 2013 festival is coming up at the end of the month in the Netherlands. Unfortunately, it’s already sold out, but there’s going to be at least one DragonFly developer there. (credit to Matthias Schmidt for letting me know about the festival)
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the listed theme is “Security and Cryptography”, but there’s plenty else.
I’m late for this, even though the students weren’t. Mea culpa! There’s been a lot of discussion on IRC, in EFNet #dragonflybsd, between the students and various DragonFly developers.
Last week was relatively light, but somehow this week I read a zillion interesting things. It’s been too dang hot to do much else, other than flop in a chair and point a fan at my head.
Your unrelated link of the week: Bones Don’t Lie. An anthropologist who blogs about various discoveries of human remains. I really enjoy blogs where someone is talking about a subject they care about – not to sell a product, not to be paid (directly), but just because they like the topic and they want to share it with others. Of course I would think that, wouldn’t I?
Thanks to the efforts of a large number of people, KMS support is showing up in DragonFly. This supports accelerated video on the new Intel graphics chipsets that seem to show up on many recent laptops.
Do you have a Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC? Well good news! Sascha Wildner brought in updated the oce(4) driver from FreeBSD to support Skyhawk models in DragonFly.
(My bad; looked at the wrong oce(4) commit originally and re-reported the import instead of the update.)
I made a hesitant attempt to keep an eye on other BSD source changes over the last week. I complain about needing coverage for the other BSDs, so I’ll see what I can do:
We’ve never had a group of student post progress this regularly. It’s great!
Busy, busy week.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Bruce Lee and Jackie Chan fight scenes.
Something new and odd: A port of the Hammer (1) filesystem into Go, for go-fuse. As the author has said, it’s more for the practice of learning Go and Hammer than for producing anything useful. Still, an interesting way to learn.
BSDTalk 228 has a nearly half-hour chat with Michael W. Lucas at BSDCan 2013.
Michael W. Lucas auctioned off his first copy of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition some time ago, with the proceeds going to the OpenBSD Foundation. It was to be signed by OpenBSD developers – which is neat enough, but apparently it was annotated by the developers, too.
Apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has been improving DragonFly’s route table performance under extremely heavy load. (e.g. run efficiently; don’t die) I don’t have a definitive commit message to point at, but looking at his recent commits are a good start.
Encryption seems to be the accidental theme tonight. A question about Hammer 2 and encryption prompted this list of possible solutions from Matthew Dillon. Hammer 2 is still months out, so these features both require time and someone interesting in doing them – though they sound quite possible.
Still not sure if I should be writing Hammer or HAMMER.