A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The 2.4 release of DragonFly is out. This is a major release, with a lot of new features packed in, so read the release notes carefully. There’s a 64-bit experimental version, too
By the way, please use a mirror. Avalon is a good one, as is chlamydia.
Updating steps I used after the cut.
Well, technically, they are 2.3.1+ packages, but they will work fine on 2.4 and can be installed via pkg_radd.
The 2.4 release has been branched, and the release ISO should be available Wednesday.
Alex Hornung has ported FreeBSD’s kbdmux, making it possible to run multiple keyboards. This can help if a system has a built-in virtual keyboard, as some newer HPs do.
If you’re running 10G Ethernet, Matthew Dillon’s turned on the inflight limiter by default, which should help keep your system from being overwhelmed if it’s not handling the greater volume of packets. If you’re not running 10G Ethernet, this shouldn’t affect you. If only we all could be so lucky.
The packages directory on avalon.dragonflybsd.org now has a i386 directory and an amd64 directory. I’ve changed pkg_search and pkg_radd to base their search/retrieval on processor arch; this means that once we have pkgsrc packages built on a 64-bit platform, they will be accessible.
If you back up the pseudo-file-systems (PFS) on your Hammer volume to a non-Hammer disk, and then need to restore them to a new Hammer volume, and then realize you forgot to write down the shared-uuid, well, then, YONETANI Tomokazu has a patch for you. I haven’t seen this committed yet, but it appears valuable.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert added a tool, chkmoddeps, which checks for missing modules that are required by other modules. Useful if you are working with the kernel.
Alex Hornung has added support for ATA command passthrough. As a pleasant side effect, smartmontools works with AHCI again.
Matthew Dillon’s changed the scheduler to fix a problem with small writes taking longer than they should. This should have a noticable, though not necessarily perfect effect on interactivity, especially for those using DragonFly as a desktop.
Alexander Polakov has made it possible to use UTF8 as the default system encoding, which makes non-ASCII characters viewable everywhere. It makes a full buildworld/buildkernel process necessary. He also did it without making /bin and /sbin dynamic, which is good news for anyone who might happen to lose /usr.
Mahdi Montazeri sent in the URL to another new BSD site: irbsd.com. It’s a generic web framework reposting RSS feeds from other people, without linking back to the originals, so nothing new.
Matthew Dillon posted the results of a full bulk build of pkgsrc on a 64-bit DragonFly system; the success rate was relatively high for a new platform and pkgsrc-current. The pkg_radd(1) and pkg_search(1) utilities will need some changes.
The dragonflybsd.org site(s) were down due to a network provider problem over the last 24 hours; they’re back now.
Dru Lavigne has found a new cross-BSD news site, BSD News Network. I would like to see it get away from a generic blog layout and hold something other than RSS feed data, since there’s already TheDailyBSD and BSDNews and BSDPlanet for that.
I may be a bit grumpy about it since sites that aggregate BSD news feeds often end up being something close to 50% composed of words originally typed by me, because of the Digest’s regularity. I’d like to see BSD news sources with at least a hint of authorial voice, not machine-operated copying. FreeBSD – the unknown Giant is close to that, for instance.
Hubert Feyrer posted a link to a set of benchmarks of various BSDs (and Linux) using Ruby. DragonFly, despite not working with a SMP kernel on the test software, had comparatively good results.
Are you running DragonFly on a laptop system? Please mention the brand and model number on the appropriate page on the DragonFly website. (Also: Laptop tips and tricks, thanks to Alexander Polakov)
The main page of the dragonflybsd.org site now has a feed of the most recent 10 articles from this Digest.
I don’t know how recently this recording was made, but Dru Lavigne found a recording of Jeffrey Hsu (longtime DragonFly committer) taking about How To Get Started with Kernel Programming.