Matthew Dillon wrote up an idea on how to adaptively deal with interrupt routing. He’s not working actively on it, so it’s available as a (possibly performance-enhancing) project.
The exact count stands at 2,003 posts with this one. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this may be the most frequently updated BSD-oriented news site in existence.
(via hubertf) BasicallyTech.com has an article up about using bc, the command line calculator. Basic but useful. I often type ‘cal‘, thinking that’s what I need for a calculator.
Sepherosa Ziehau, an already-prolific committer, has now committed a large quantity of updates: a sync of USB support from FreeBSD, along with the ural(4) (wireless CardBus) and rum(4) (wireless 802.11 over USB) drivers originally from OpenBSD.
Seen on pkgsrc-users@: A new tool for pkgsrc upgrades, called pkg_rolling-replace. It’s in pkgtools. It builds replacements for programs in order of dependency, without removing everything first. Strangely, it was funded by DARPA.
Also, the latest version of Apache 2.2 has been brought into pkgsrc. I link to the message because it also describes how to set the 2.2 version as the default for every other package that requires Apache.
A recent FreeBSD firewire bug that could also affect DragonFly is fixed.
geom_nbsd is a module that lets a FreeBSD machine read the disklabels from other BSD machines, including DragonFly.
Thomas Spanjaard’s ‘nata’ system now has a features description, plus how to patch and install, for those feeling adventurous.
If you happen to run out of bpfx devices, Joerg Sonnenberger has an easy solution: MAKEDEV more.
Thomas Spanjaard committed his new version (from FreeBSD, avoiding GEOM) of the ata architecture (nata). It can be compiled with this patch, though it’s not ready for use yet.
BSDStats.org sent out a summary of reporting hosts; there’s about 2,000 FreeBSD users and almost nobody else on other architectures. There’s only one DragonFly user reporting in North America, which I assume is me.
Peter Avalos has a port of OpenBSD’s dhclient program available for testing. The OpenBSD version runs with reduced privileges, compared to the current DragonFly dhclient.
Also, Victor Balada Diaz has his newest version of the jail code, allowing multiple IPs within a jail and also IPv6.
The newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Thomas Spanjaard. He’s currently working on an upgrade of the disk system.
Matthew Dillon has added some rough notes on how to port FreeBSD drivers over to DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon has removed the global VM page hash table, and replaced it with a per-VM-object red-black tree. According to his post, memory usage is reduced, with no impact on performance.
Matthew Dillon posted an in-depth explanation of how he plans to both simplify and speed up filesystem access, starting after the start of the new year.
I posted about it before, but Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert supplied more details: there’s going to be a DragonFly hackathon at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin at the end of the year. Visit the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet if you’d like to coordinate rooms/board/meeting up.
This could be quite good; the recent NetBSD hackathon generated a lot of results.
Dmitri Nikulin happened to post an interesting idea: complete virtualization of DragonFly. (Last paragraph of message.) It’s similar to Inferno.
BSDNews has an interesting link to a Inquirer article benchmarking the new Intel processors. While it does wander into excessive acronyms, it’s interesting that the benchmarking is done using a variety of BSDs.