Alexander Polakov is putting together an update for the complex beast that is ACPI, but he has two questions that need an answer, about locking and APICs. Please help if you know something about it, as an up-to-date ACPI helps everyone.
I’ll indulge myself in a bit of roguelike enjoyment: the @Play column is targeting roguelike equipment types, starting with Potions and Scrolls. Loot!
Hubert Feyrer posted a note about time zones, describing how to find what’s defined on a system (all his steps work on DragonFly) and tricks to set it locally. Along the same lines is this “A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database” that talks about all the historical details. (via) Of course, I have to mention Sascha Wildner, who has been carefully keeping DragonFly’s time zone data up to date for quite a while.
Update: and again!
Matthew Dillon went to the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Conference at Google’s offices in California, and took some pictures. It’s all available on Flickr. He was the only DragonFly attendee, but check to see what developers on other open-source projects look like in person. There’s even the not-related-to-me Joel Sherrill (on the left).
If you’re going to the CCC, there’s several DragonFly people going, and they are working to rent an apartment for the several days of the event. Follow up with Matthias if you’re going too.
Sorry for the downtime today – shiningsilence.com is now running DragonFly 2.4 and Hammer, so I’ll be able to complain testify first-hand.
If you aren’t familiar with the phrase “eating your own dogfood”, here’s what it is.
With some recent reports of people running DragonFly on Eee 900 and Acer Aspire netbook models, here’s a link to a recent O’Reilly column that links to a whole bunch of different netbook vendors. If you have some spare cash and an urge for a netbook, try DragonFly on one and report back…
‘mike’ made this interesting csh script that allows autocompletion of Hammer sub-commands. e.g. type ‘hammer’ and then cycle through the available hammer commands as you would through file names.
Jan Lentfer repeated his Postgres tests on DragonFly with some system changes suggested by Matthew Dillon, and noticed a speed increase. (See previous report.)
If you’re running an AMD64 DragonFly system, there’s new pkgsrc binaries for you on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. (See report) The pkg_radd utility will pick them up automatically, or you can use pkgin.
Update: Well, be patient if what you need isn’t there yet. The packages are still uploading to avalon…
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added gdb 7 to the base system.
It’s possible to speed up a ‘make buildworld’ by increasing the number of parallel make processes, with the -j option. However, the optimal number of make processes depends on your system setup. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert did some testing, and it looks like the number of CPUs +1 is the best option – as long as you have more than 1 CPU. His writeup even includes a nice graph.
Johannes Hofmann has taken over estd, a “frequency scaling daemon for NetBSD and DragonFly”. The newest release brings multicore support on DragonFly.
This description of a Hammer bug makes for interesting reading, since it delves into the sequence of events where data is actually laid down on disk. Interesting reading for a geek, admittedly…
Do you have an Acer Aspire One D150 and you want DragonFly to work on it? Alexander Polakov has one something similar, and he got it to boot. Sound and wireless networking works too.
Nuno Antunes has a compact writeup of what it would take to finish porting netgraph7 to DragonFly, if you’re interested…
The build for pkgsrc-2009Q3 packages performed on i386 DragonFly 2.5 is complete. There’s a build log. These packages are immediately available if you are on a 2.5/i386 system and use pkg_radd. If you want to upgrade, try pkgin or pkg_rolling-replace.
I’m upgrading hardware, so this site will be down for a bit today. This is separate from anything happening with dragonflybsd.org systems.
Version 3 of Hammer is now available in bleeding-edge DragonFly, though it’s still experimental. The biggest reason for this version bump is to move the /snapshots folder to /var for all Hammer filesystems. This means an accidental <tt>rm -rf</tt> won’t destroy snapshots, as I’ve done. The saved data is still on the original partition, as just the metadata is saved to /var. More explication is available.
Jan Lentfer performed some Postgres benchmarks on DragonFly. It’s elaborate enough that it’s in the form of a PDF attached to the message I’ve linked. There’s some additional variations that haven’t been tried yet.
Vigorous file system activity seemed to lower performance in the long term on Hammer, which is certainly something to investigate. More testing please!