As predicted and now announced, pkgsrc is now frozen for the next week. If everything goes well, we’ll have pkgsrc-2011Q3 next week.
Francois Tigeot has done another set of benchmarks using blogbench to test reading and writing under different DragonFly versions, plus some OpenIndiana benchmarks just to mix it up. Writing performance seems to have drastically improved between DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.
His post has an attached PDF with, of course, graphs. This site has previously mentioned other not-really-comparable disk testing performed by Francois.
I might have a job open at my workplace soon, for a junior admin/support/network role. (Department is too small for narrowly defined roles…) I’ll post about it here if it happens.
- libguestfs, ‘tools for accessing and modifying virtual machine disk images’. (via) I can think of a lot of places that could be useful.
- I did not know this, but FreshBSD tracks DragonFly commits, along with the commit logs of most (all?) other BSDs.
- Bruce Perens set up a “Covenant” license for the HPCC database (powers Lexis/Nexis) that is actually pretty good at allowing something to be both open source and commerical; the ‘release notes‘ talk about it.
- I agree with these sentiments on hiring exactly. If you really like what you do, you don’t just do it at work. (The author’s followup.) Putting it in a more positive light, showing work on open source, outside of your workplace, is a great thing to add to your resume. Never trust the graphic designer with sloppy handwriting.
- The majority of the 10 most stable web providers out there are running a BSD. FreeBSD, in this case. (via, via) (why does Twitter make it so hard to link to things? Cause they don’t want you reading the web – just them.)
- Usenet, as of 1981, with posts arriving in actual time (-30 years). (via) You can even use a NNTP reader to connect. Similar to but not as colossal as telehack, mentioned here before.
- DragonFly deployment.
- I am so proud of myself for coming up with this joke.
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Saturday Morning Breakfast Cereal. It used to mostly be violent and nonsensical, but recent strips are excellent, like this one or this.
I proposed some changes to the way DragonFly does releases, and how we handle pkgsrc binary builds. The thread on kernel@ is a bit long, so just read my summation. My idea for a longer release cycle didn’t really fly, but pkgsrc binaries will be built on a rolling basis, I think.
From what I can tell, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made some changes where you can control TCP timeout and keepalive timing on a per-tcpcb basis, or at least that’s what I gleaned from the docs. He’s been doing a lot of work lately, but it’s hard to link to because so much of it is at a basic level that makes it difficult to summarize in terms of how the features affect the user.
DragonFly had another good year with Google’s Summer of Code program. We had 6 slots, and 5 passed projects. (Irinia, if you’re reading this – where did you go?) This is our 4th year participating in Summer of Code, with I think the highest number of passed projects to date.
Here’s all the finished projects, with links to the original descriptions:
- Bring kernel event notification in DragonFly BSD to its logical conclusion – Samuel Greear
- Implementing a mirror target for device mapper – Adam Hoka
- Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy – Brills Peng
- Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD – Nick Prokharau
- Porting Virtio Drivers from NetBSD to DragonFly BSD to speed up DragonFly BSD as a KVM guest – Stephanie Ouillon
Thanks is also due to the mentors and other that helped out, via IRC and email: Aggelos Economopoulos, Alex Hornung, Joe Talbott, Matthias Schmidt, Michael Neumann, Nathaniel Filardo, Pratyush Kshirsagar, Sascha Wildner, Thomas Nikolajsen, and Venkatesh Srinivas
You can also check the Digest’s “Google Summer of Code” category for progress reports made as the summer went on. The source code from the projects is available at the DragonFly/SOC 2011 Google Project Page. In even better news, 2 of the projects have already been partially committed to DragonFly – Brills Peng’s scheduler work, and Adam Hoka’s device mapper mirror project.
For reasons unknown to me, there’s enough functional change between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 that it affected a lot of PHP-based programs. For that reason, PHP 5 in pkgsrc defaults to the 5.2 version. However, it’s going to be 5.3 for the next stable quarterly release of pkgsrc. In theory, all PHP5-dependent programs are ready to handle that now. Note that PHP 5.3 is already in pkgsrc; it just wasn’t the default. If you were using the php53 package, it may require some manual fiddling at your next upgrade of pkgsrc packages.
Some ISA devices have been removed from DragonFly. That probably affects approximately 0% of everyone, cause they’re old devices, but a few of them are were in the GENERIC kernel configs, so you’ll get an error for an unrecognized option when you next rebuild your kernel using a GENERIC-based config, based on an older version of GENERIC. The description of which drivers went is quite sensibly placed in UPDATING.
At some point, you may want to generate binary programs that are unstripped of debugging information. You may want to generate them with pkgsrc. Here’s a little note on what options will make that happen.
The ‘freeze’ period (when bugfixes are the only addition) for pkgsrc will start on September 18th, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q3, scheduled for the 25th. Think of it as an early Christmas present.
John Marino, who already has commit access for DragonFly, now also has commit access for pkgsrc. What does this mean? It means if you have a pkgsrc problem, submit it through NetBSD’s Problem Report system as normal, and maybe let him know about it too. He’s already made some DragonFly-specific fixes.
I posted some ideas about changing how DragonFly does releases. In short, I’d like to see a long term release, and otherwise point people at a rolling release; e.g. that day’s build. There are other people that think the same way about speeding up releases of other software. (Thanks, Samuel Greear for that last link)
Happy birthday to my younger daughter, Claire, who is 9 today. That’s a much better anniversary to celebrate today.
- A musing about the waveform and how it’s the most iconic representation of music. It’s also a holdover from analog days, if you think about it. (via)
- There seems to be a new kinda-improper activity from GoDaddy found every 6 months or so. Find yourself a new registrar, if you haven’t already.
- Here’s how you know DragonFly is actually getting somewhere: exploits show up.
- Not directly BSD related, but it’s from Colin Percival, writing as “FreeBSD Security Officer”. With the recent Diginotar news, he points out what’s the best secure certificate to forge.
- Introduction to Arduino, a comic guide. (via)
- “A jpeg is worth 1000kb“, talking about ZORK and other text adventures. Look for the twisty column of familiar phrases, all alike. The Interactive Fiction genre of game is still going surprisingly strong, so many years later.
- That article about ZORK links to this excellent, excellent exploration of the original Colossal Cave game, which led to Adventure and so many other games. Oh yeah, the author was building ARPANet at the time, too.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Chainsawsuit.
Noticed through a saved Google search: DragonFly BSD support as part of Puppet. This was thanks to the work of a ‘jaydg’. Thanks, person whose name I probably should know!
The recent OpenBSD 5.0 pre-release announcement on undeadly notes that ALTQ is being replaced by new priority settings. This should make it to DragonFly at some point, since pf in DragonFly has been catching up to the current version of pf in OpenBSD, thanks to the efforts of Jan Lentfer…
The Call for Papers for the 28th Chaos Communications Congress is out, as Matthias Rampke noted. Each year, there seems to be at least a few DragonFly people there…
BSD Magazine’s September issue is out. This time, I have an article in it about data recovery with Hammer:
We’ve all experienced instant regret. That’s the feeling that comes within a second of executing a command like “rm -rf * .txt” (note the space) or of cutting the wrong cluster of wires at the end of a long conduit. Not that I am quoting from experience, or anything like that, no…
Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.
It’s almost the end of summer here, or at least the traditional end of summer in North America. About time, too! I don’t like the heat. Anyway, as people trickle back to school, some more interesting doodads should show up for these weekly Lazy Reading posts…
- Yet another git cheatsheet, this time for KDE. (Via TGEN on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What’s wrong with sort and how to fix it. I will enthusiastically link to any article that mentions letters like þ. (There’s others that this stupid blogging software just eats when I write out the HTML entities.)
- Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wonder if I could run some really old software. Like 4.1c BSD?” Well, today’s your lucky day.
- Creating new Linux base and infrastructure ports on FreeBSD. Interesting to see just how complex it can be.
- Distributed computing at Google. (PDF, via) I like the description of the error/failure rates and how they escalate as an architecture scales up.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Jack Kirby art on what would have been his 94th birthday. I have trouble communicating how dramatic and influential his art has been.
Sascha Wildner updated time zone files again. It’s a regular thing, but I wanted to draw attention to this little change:
Samoa moves from east to west of the international date line (changes from UTC-11 to UTC+13). It will skip December 30, 2011.
2011/12/30 in Samoa will never exist or have existed, which is entirely odd.