A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you’re on any of the dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, I’m converting them over from bestserv to Mailman. I’ve done bugs@, commits@, hammer@, and test@ so far, and I’ll move the old archives over to the same format as soon as I find an actual mbox file with the old messages in it. The remaining lists should be tomorrow.
(If you got a note tonight from a list you were sure you were unsubscribed from, that was my fault; sorry! I didn’t understand the format of the bestserv user lists.)
DragonFly user varialus has created a page on the DragonFly website (it’s a wiki, after all) with all the notes taken from trying installation, etc. There’s far more notes than I expected there, so it’s worth a read.
Much of this new document has been around in other forms for a while, but now, there’s a brief guide on porting drivers to DragonFly in the source tree.
LOPSA East is happening next May in New Jersey. I haven’t seen mention of this on any BSD list, but there’s definitely Unixy things happening there. The call for papers is out.
The September issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as usual. Visit the site to find out the table of contents.
David Gwynne talks for 31 minutes about OpenBSD on BSDTalk 219. Also, Will Backman, the host of BSDTalk is heading to Tbilisi, Georgia next month. Say ‘hi’ if you’re a Georgian.
This recent question asked on-list about creating your own file system meandered into good reference books. This so far was “The Design and Implementation of the FreeBSD Operating System“, “Modern Operating Systems“, and the paper “Vnodes: An Architecture for Multiple File System Types in Sun UNIX“. Looking for links on those things led me to this Unix filesystem history paper from IBM, which is fun reading.
I’m saying that unironically! It really is an interesting document to read, for historical and general knowledge. I am a nerd.
Adrian Chadd has apparently been smushing FreeBSD onto MIPS systems for some time, and he’s going to talk about it tomorrow night at the NYCBUG meeting. I’m noting it because I’ve always found it interesting how much can be stripped out of a kernel and userland and still have a functional system.
BSD Magazine has a “Best of 2011” issue out for purchase; it has updated versions of various articles published over the last year in BSD Magazine. The price is not clear on the website.
I hope you like your links eclectic this week.
Your unrelated link of the week: Flux Machine. Be patient; the images are animated to good effect.
Because here’s some recommendations on good models, and here’s a way to check SSD health. Seriously, they’re great.
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.
If you have a LSI RAID card, meaning you are using the mfi(4) driver, Sascha Wildner has added /proc/devices to linprocfs, so that LSI’s MegaCLI configuration utility will run.
Sascha Wildner has pushed smart battery support, based on a patch from Dmitry Komissaroff and FreeBSD. He asks people to try it out. It apparently provides for more accurate battery charge level readings?
Francois Tigeot benchmarked several different operating systems using Postgres 9.2b3, including DragonFly, and published the results. I have a local copy of the PDF since the attachment didn’t really survive the archiving. Follow the thread for discussion. The Linux results look abnormally high, so it is possible that something different is happening on that platform…
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.
Do you happen to have the saved messages for one or more @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists sitting around? Hopefully in mbox format? I’m working on getting Mailman installed to replace bestserv, and being able to bring in the old messages would be nice.
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.)
I’m working on building new images, but: DragonFly 3.0.3 has been tagged. If you’re running 3.0, you can update and get some of the recent bug fixes.
I noticed that this recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau is a bug fix for jme(4). The commit thanks a JMicron employee for help. It’s always appreciated when a vendor is helpful to an open-source project for hardware support. It’s also something you should consider the next time you are shopping for computer parts.
