Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects. DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done. However, we need ideas, the more the better. Please add whatever comes to mind.
That would be a recent ATI card, though I don’t know exactly which model name. Samuel Greear has imported David Shao’s DRM work, originally for Summer of Code, last year. Most newer Radeons should work (?).
There’s a rare crash in DragonFly 2.10, where applications would segfault. The system would run find. This is apparently more likely to happen in 2.12, though reports on this vary. It’s real, though.
Matthew Dillon went looking for this bug, and happened to roll back vm_token, the last lock in DragonFly that presented a serious impediment to multiprocessing. It’s a big patch. It fixes the problem, which is great! It also happens to make DragonFly buildworlds almost twice as fast depending on the number of cores in the system.
Holy crap we want to get that out… but it makes some significant changes to the system and needs to be tested. So, the next release probably won’t be for a few weeks.
If you want to help, build master and do something with it – move data, run server programs, whatever. Report crashes. This performance improvement is worth working for.
I didn’t know this existed, but there it is: the BSD Router Project is a software router, which just reached version 1.0. (via)
I know this happens normally, but I like to point out that it exists. From the recent pkgsrc-2011Q3 bulk build reports I posted, Samuel Greear found two problems to fix, and thanks to him and OBATA Akio, net/net-snmp and devel/poco are fixed for DragonFly.
I build this up over the course of the week, so I’m never sure what to put here. Does it matter? The meat is the links.
- The Binding of Issac. It’s a roguelike, with shooter elements. It’s also creepy. Here’s the Flash demo. (Windows and Mac only, aww.)
- Why transparency is a good idea. (via… Michael Lucas? I lost track, sorry)
- The JFDI Theory of Language Adoption. This applies to operating systems too; create the shortest possible path between people and what they want to do on that OS.
- NetBSD has added SQLite to the base system. (via) Interesting… having a database(ish) always available leads to some new ways to keep data, outside of the usually “stuff in a text file” format.
Your totally off-topic link for the week: Fat Birds.
I have some pkgsrc-2011Q3 builds done, for x86_64 and i386. I performed them on DragonFly 2.11, but they should work fine for 2.12/2.13. They’re uploading to the pkgsrc-2011Q3 folder on mirror-master, so you’ll need to set PKG_PATH correctly to use them via pkg_radd.
PKG_PATH=http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/packages/x86_64/DragonFly-2.13/stable/
The x86_64 package upload is done, and I anticipate the i386 one will be done within the next 24 hours.
Go, look at the BSDday Argentina 2011 site. Follow the appropriate link for the languages you understand – it’s a console simulation! (via)
I did not realize this, but MMC/SD cards are not supported in the default DragonFly kernel. Or at least, they weren’t until now. (also committed to 2.12)
Update: PCI-based MMC/SD readers, specifically. USB ones were already recognized as umass devices.
They aren’t really release candidates per se, just “images I built from the 2.12 branch”, but they are available for testing.
There’s only two commits, already in DragonFly-current, to add to 2.12 before it’s clear of all listed release requirements. And maybe binary package builds… which I’m about 2/3 of the way through.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the people behind UNIX and the C language, has died. (via skullY on #dragonflybsd on EFNet) Look at his Bell Labs web page for some details on his history. The death of Steve Jobs will get a lot of media attention, but I’d argue that Ritchie affected more computers in far more ways.
I got mine the other day, and here’s someone else’s.
It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on hardware support being split up per-CPU, judging by this commit – one of many, recently.
Some newer laptops have Intel integrated video chipsets that require GEM/KMS to work well; they are supported by the vesa driver in X, but performance isn’t great. Johannes Hofmann found this out the hard way. GEM/KMS support is on the way for various BSDs, but it’s not here yet. Just be aware of this if shopping for a new laptop in the next little while…
Among other changes to pkgin 0.5 (available in pkgsrc-wip but not pkgsrc-2011Q3), it now notices if you need a newer pkg_install because you’ve shifted to a more recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, and grabs the appropriate binary package to fix that. Thanks, iMil!
Getting close to 2.12 release…
- Steam and Team Fortress 2 running on a BSD – PC-BSD with an NVIDIA driver, in this case, but it may apply to other cards and other games. Using Wine is always so intricate, it seems.
- Remember how suddenly a large chunk of Internet traffic was suddenly routed through China, briefly in early 2010? Apparently it’s happened a few more times since then. This article at the Economist talks about that and the SCION project, in an accessible way.
- The 2011 Interactive Fiction Competition has released this year’s entries, and almost all of them can be played online. (via) There goes a few hours of your life. Sorry.
- Speaking of hours, there’s apparently a civil lawsuit that has rendered timezone data unavailable. Here’s a good summation. It’s a frustrating scenario. (via multiple places)
- World’s best introduction to sed.
User ‘Zenny’ asked questions about setting up a server similar to ones described in this presentation, except using DragonFly and Hammer. Most of it is possible now, going by the thread.
Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.
There’s only one multiprocessing bottleneck left in DragonFly: vm_token. Matthew Dillon’s working on removing it, and he’s been testing his initial results on a 4-core machine and a 48-core machine, using heavily parallelized buildworlds to test concurrency. He’s posted the results, showing an initial speedup of up to 30%. This definitely isn’t going to make it into 2.12, but it’s looking good already. Keep in mind these are improvements on top of the performance graphed here yesterday.