This report from yours truly is using pkgsrc-current, so it reflects some of what will show up in pkgsrc-2012Q1. John Marino has already fixed some of the “top breakage” items, so the numbers should be even better for the next one…
It runs from now to April 6th, so nothing but bug fixes in pkgsrc until then. If you have any package fixes you needed, now’s the time to ask someone.
If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly (meaning version 3.1), you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update. ‘make quickworld’ will appear to succeed but the kernel won’t work.
If you’re running DragonFly 3.0.x, this does not affect you.
Konrad Neuwirth is running Apache inside a jail, and getting some weird errors. Obviously I don’t know the fix, but Chris Turner knows what the settings need to be.
We have pkgsrc binaries still around for DragonFly 2.6/2.7. As I posted, I’d like to get rid of them. Would that inconvenience anyone?
We don’t have a set expiration policy. We probably should.
Carsten Mattner wrote out his notes on EFI booting on a Mac. This gets you closer to booting DragonFly on there, but I don’t think it is completely working yet.
Update: Carsten Mattner has a better summation than what I wrote.
That’s pkgsrc-2012Q1 I’m talking about. It appears KDE will jump from 4.5 (what’s there now) to 4.8, and Zope/Plone will be removed. This will make you happy or sad depending on whether you have these things installed.
If you do, acpi_hp could use some testing. Sascha Wildner just brought some improvements in for that module. I’ve seen discounted HP laptops show up in various places, recently.
I’m making sure I post this Lazy Reading on the right day. A nice full week’s worth of stuff.
- Bandwidth used when loading different web pages. (via) The largest one is also the most surprising.
- Do you have an IBM x3550? Turn ACPI off.
- The recent TCL presentation at NYCBUG is available in audio form.
- Did you want to know a lot of detail on how to do journaled soft updates in UFS? You want detail, you got it. (via, via) (Is that a repeat link? I don’t think so…)
- This is totally useful if you’re using ssh from a Windows machine.
- SSH is used as a noun and a verb, I just realized. No link, it’s just me noticing verbification.
- BSDCan 2012 registration is open. (via Michael Lucas’s Twitter feed) Conventions are awesome. You should go.
- Michael Lucas talks about book promotion with his recent book. There’s a graph, so it’s automatically great.
- Speaking of books, Modern Perl: The Book is free to download in PDF form.
- A story about _why. (via) I’m not so interested in his identity, but in what he did to get people to program.
- My git habits. (Not mine; that’s just the title.) Speaking of learning, I’ve always thought the next steps past learning the basics of anything is to then see how experienced people approach it, idiomatically.
- Why Juniper Gives Back to the FreeBSD Community. I link to this because I like what they are doing, and also because in a perfect world I would rather have a BSD-ish interface on my networking equipment than fiddle with IOS. Oh well.
- Bunnie Huang always builds neat stuff. This time it’s a Geiger counter. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Neo Scavenger. (via) It’s a game, in Flash, and in beta. If you like postapocalyptic survival, it may be for you.
BSD Magazine is looking for articles – specifically DragonFly articles, though I imagine it doesn’t have to be. I’m stretched too thin to write anything right now, but if you have something, contact them.
The freeze for the next version of pkgsrc, 2012Q1, will start March 22nd and end with the quarterly release being released on April 6th.
(I hope someone gets the joke.)
Here’s the page, with a convenient mentor application note at the bottom. That’s the next step, so if you were thinking of mentoring, now is the time.
John Marino’s updated DragonFly’s version of GCC 4.4 to 4.4.7, apparently the final version of GCC 4.4. What’s next? I imagine GCC 4.6 at some point. It’s always a fun (maybe bikeshed-ish) conversation on which compiler to install, and which to have in base.
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.
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.)
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.
If for some reason you needed DragonFly 2.6 ISOs, or older, there’s a mirror.
It’s now possible to specify a jail ID when using pgrep and pkill(1), to capture processes specific to a jail. It’s similar to the same option in FreeBSD, except no compatibility issues since this option did not previously exist in DragonFly.