Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented an asynchronous pru_send in sendfile. The results are a 70-90% increase in performance, as shown in his netperf localhost test.
DragonFly now uses Redmine for bugs.dragonflybsd.org. This means that the bugs@ and submit@ lists have can still be read by anyone, but to post a new bug or patch, or reply, you need to be registered on the bug tracker itself. You don’t have to be subscribed to the mailing list to use the web interface. See the bugs@ and submit@ announcements for other details.
The man page for dfregress has been put together, and you can read it and find out how to contribute, right now.
(That man page should be up by the time this is posted…)
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado has been working with clang and DragonFly, along with Sascha Wildner. DragonFly mostly compiles using clang, with lib/citrus being (the only? one of?) the last holdouts. Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado detailed how to test it out using clang 3.0 in case someone else wants to help solve this.
If you’re tracking DragonFly current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update. Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes in route(8) that a quickworld will not catch.
The two things that make my day! The work on DragonFly-current has led to some significant speed improvements. So good, that Samuel Greear’s post on OSNews.org links to graphed results from him and from Francois Tigeot (multi-page PDF) showing the results from pgbench.
The results show a jump in multi-core/processor numbers that vastly exceeds DragonFly 2.10’s performance, and is comparable to FreeBSD 9/10. Here’s some of what did it.
Alex Hornung has created ‘dfregress’, a test framework designed to be as simple as possible for adding tests to DragonFly. This would make it easier to verify an upcoming release is correct, for instance. See his commit note for extensive details, and add a trivial test for anything you value.
This is another one of those features that I bet goes away, and nobody would notice because nobody uses it any more. Sascha Wildner has removed AppleTalk from DragonFly.
The host leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been upgraded to new hardware. This is the machine used for anyone who wants to develop on DragonFly, so there’s a good performance boost there for developers. It also hosts bugs.dragonflybsd.org, which should be working again soon.
DragonFly has a new memory allocator, called (not surprisingly) “dmalloc“. It’s only present on x86_64, not i386, because it could eat up more VSZ (virtual memory) than an i386 kernel may have available.
I’m going for more verbose linking. Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it? If not – too late!
- NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“. He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
- It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux. “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“. Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
- I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation. Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
- Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design. (via) The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF. The book for the class should make interesting reading. Oh, you can see the class details, too.
- FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”. Get on the mailing list if this interests you. Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented. There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
- If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches. (via) I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.
Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry. Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics. Slightly NSFW, sometimes.
The presence of /usr/include/crypt.h in DragonFly (starting in December 2010) meant that some programs compiled during that time will expect that file to always be there. It was recently removed, so any programs compiled in that timeframe will also need to be recompiled. Right now, this affects you only if you are running DragonFly 2.13 , since that’s the only place crypt.h was removed. This may be an issue for the release, but we’ll worry about that when we get there… I’m kicking off new 2.13 bulk builds now.
There’s a new page up on the DragonFly website, about using rpkgmanager to manage your pkgsrc-installed packages.
In DragonFly, there’s only a few places C++ is used. If you wanted to make sure DragonFly was pure C, Samuel Greear lists those remaining nooks and crannies.
Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now… except these last 31. I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after. Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.
You can now have, in theory, up to 32 terabytes of RAM on your 64-bit DragonFly system, from a change made by Matthew Dillon. I’m curious to see if anyone has even 1 terabyte, as that’s at least feasible.
John Marino added tuning support within GCC 4.4 for the Geode CPU. Waaaay back when, these were x86 -compatible Cyrix chips. Nowadays I think they are most common in single–board computers.
The November issue of BSD Magazine is out. No DragonFly content again, in part because I wasn’t even sure when the deadline was. (The editor changed.)
Some cleanup in the CVS -> git process wasn’t happening, so if you have been using pkgsrc 2011Q3 from git (i.e. via make in /usr), re-pull to make sure you have everything.
(The post noting this seems to have been eaten by the mailarchive… that’ll be replaced.)