Peter Avalos has committed his speedups for OpenSSL encryption (using assembly), along with a lot of numbers to show performance changes. It’s definitely sped up, but the quantity of values is so large that you’d have to visualize it differently to get a summary I could show here.
If you’re between 12 and 18 years of age, Google Code-In has started. There’s plenty of tasks available for DragonFly BSD, so jump in now! (or, well, wait a few days for the holiday if you’re a U.S. resident.)
A general roundup of things, this week.
- The 1978 Bell System Technical Journal, describing this new Unix thing. (via)
- The book Modern Perl is out, written by chromatic. I link to it for two reasons: the first is that while the book is available for purchase, it’s also available as a free download, with the only condition that you must tell others about it. The second reason – and the reason I’d mention this book anyway – is that chromatic writes on his site and for O’Reilly, and his articles are succinct and enjoyable. The Web is a deluge of text, so any author that can hold your attention, with all the other sources to read, is worth following.
- More NYCBSDCon 2010 stuff, from the comments on my previous post: Will Backman has partial audio recordings, and Jason Dixon’s adventure is online. (thanks, Will and Lawrence)
- This summary of the (BSD-ish) Tarsnap service made me smile.
- Top 5 Best Practices for an Open Source Development Community. (via) I especially agree with items 2 and 3.
- Oddly compelling. (via everywhere)
If you can see this, the RSS switch worked. Here’s hoping.
I’m moving the RSS feeds for the site to go through Feedburner, so I can see how actively they are used. I’m putting in a redirect, so it should not (I hope) affect reading it for anyone, but this note is here just in case.
The new location for the RSS feed will be: http://feeds.feedburner.com/dragonflybsddigest
Peter Avalos is working on having OpenSSL use assembly code. On i386, he reports initial rough results of blowfish working 15% faster, and DES doubling in speed. (seen via IRC.)
The utility pkg_add has a -u option that tells it to upgrade any existing matched package with a given binary package. Since pkg_radd passes options on to the underlying use of pkg_add, after automatically setting a remote repository for binary files, pkg_radd -u <packagename> tells pkg_add to automatically find and upgrade a package.
I never thought this would work. However, I’m building a package on a system that has pkgsrc-2010Q1 packages installed, but a pkgsrc-2010Q3 /usr/pkgsrc. Every time I’ve encountered an error because installed software was too low a version, pkg_radd -uv <package_name> has resulted in a quick upgrade.
I’m not recommending this as a new upgrade method; I’m noting how unexpectedly well this experiment is going. It may be just blind luck, but this sure would be nice if it ‘just worked’.
Peter Avalos is bringing in OpenSSL 1.0.0b. I’m not sure what the difference between 1.0.0b and 1.0.1 would be. Also, Alex Hornung has updated vn(4) – there’s more updates than the one I linked.
Naoya Sugioka had trouble booting DragonFly on his Dell M4400. He updated ACPICA with this patch, and was able to boot. I link to it in case someone else with a recent Dell model (or perhaps just a laptop with the same chipset?) has the same issues.
Another point release for DragonFly 2.8 is planned, with a bunch of small updates, some of which have been covered here recently.
Jan Lentfer, who apparently has a high tolerance for pain, has now brought the kernel part of pf up to the equivalent of the OpenBSD 4.4 version, available for testing. It’s not yet committed. pfctl’s updated too.
Francois Tigeot was able to get wip/jdk15 to build on DragonFly, from pkgsrc-wip. Unfortunately, the package has been removed, but he’s looking to put it back.
Marius Nünnerich posted a call for papers for FOSDEM 2011. Submissions need to be in by December 20th; the Brussels conference itself is happening in February.
(Has anyone been to this? What was it like?)
If you have any last-minute suggestions for Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly, pass them along now – it starts Monday! Post them here, or in #dragonflybsd on EFNet IRC, or on the kernel@ mailing list. We have 34 already, but you can never have too many.
My NYCBSDCon 2010 summary, or How I Spent My New York City vacation:
Well, almost – I’m still in an airport. I didn’t get to liveblog because of some Atheros chipset issues that are now conveniently solved, but I’ll have a lengthy post by tomorrow detailing the NYCBSDCon convention. The short version: lots of fun, you all should do it.
A number of people have encountered this: while installing some larger pkgsrc package, the process stops on a strange DocBook error. Alex Hornung has a fix: symlink /usr/pkg/etc/xml/catalog to /usr/pkg/share/xml/catalog.
It has multiple authors at this point starting with Chris Turner and moving to Siju George, but: the Flash setup is in the quickstart document. As I recall, someone put together a changed library for it that fixes a audio/video sync issue. Oh wait, I did find that before.
Dovecot, a rather popular IMAP/POP3 mail server, has had version 2 arrive in pkgsrc. There’s an upgrade guide on pkgsrc-users@ if you’re thinking of upgrading.
Alex Hornung is having trouble getting his power consumption as low as it could be on his DragonFly laptop. A side effect of this problem is that when he posts about it, he also manages to enumerate all the various ways you can reduce power consumption and heat usage on a laptop. (Follow the thread for more.)