A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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.
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.
If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.
This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text. I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute. Thanks, Internet! It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.
Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!
