Author: Justin Sherrill

Chris Pressey wrote down how to fake a hard drive as a ‘live CD’.

A new ‘known stable’ ISO is on the Download page. This one should hopefully be free of the wierd filesystem corruption bug that’s been hitting people.

‘Gabor MICSKO’ has written up the current DragonFly installation process in Hungarian, with screenshots, even.

Jeroen Ruigrok tried using ‘CPUTYPE=p4’ in make.conf as an option to gcc. The resulting kernel crashed; and several people pointed out that the CPUTYPE optimization does not work – especially with gcc 2.x. Matt Dillon went on further to explain how little it helps:

“Trying to use cpu-specific optimizations in 2.95.x is roughly equivalent to a blind man driving an 18 wheeler down the highway. In other words: “don’t do it, it doesn’t work”. GCC2 is known to produce bad code not only with CPUTYPE, but also with higher optimization levels like -O2. Blame the GCC folks for this.

GCC3 does a better job but even so I would not use CPUTYPE without being prepared to turn it off when something breaks, and at best I might use -O2 or -Os (under GCC3 only, and even then we don’t really officially support it, since differentiating between compiler code generation bugs and DFly bugs is extremely difficult).

Besides, you won’t notice any improvement in kernel performance.”

Matt Dillon posted more ideas on how the DragonFly releases were to go. Specifically, different versions would be coded by slip tags instead of the branches that go on with FreeBSD:

“releaseX_Y: Specific official release, build and regression tested, including security fixes. A sub-sub version (Z) would be embedded in the uname to differentiate between updates to a release, but not be incorporated into the tag name.

release: Current official release.

developer: Developers who want to be cutting edge but still be ‘reasonably’ stable, with occassional glitches.

HEAD: Absolute latest work, might have build and other issues.

Not being branches, slip tags are limited in scope. It might not be possible to incorporate a security fix into a particular release tag, for example, all we would be able to do is tell people to upgrade to a later release. When we are able to stabilize the system interfaces (about a year and a half from now) this won’t be a big deal.”

David Rhodus announced a new BSD-oriented info site – gobsd.com. Most interestingly, it appears that it will host packages that can be added via pkg_add.

His announcement is pasted below:
Continue reading “gobsd.com created”

Matt Dillon has updated the ‘known stable’ ISO on the download page. He mentioned he plans to create a ‘stable’ tag in cvs (not a branch, but a slip tag) so that people who don’t care for experimentation can track that target.

R. E. Ceiver posted his DragonFly install experience. It follows the same form as the regular from-CD install, but a little more verbosely.

Matt Dillon has found the solution to the wierd MMX problem; it’s now safe to try kern.mmxopt=1 again. The problem turned out to be (quoting Matt) “related to the PIPE code, but only when the sysctl’s were set up for legacy algorithms. By default the PIPE code uses SFBUFs which are not effected[sic] by the bug.”

Matt Dillon’s placed a new “known stable” ISO at ftp://ftp.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/dfly-20040502.iso.gz.
Devon H. O’Dell has mirrored this image in San Jose, California, US, and Amsterdam, Holland. Only one month until June, and 1.0! (Though it probably won’t released this early in June.)

Matt Dillon’s updated his diary page.

If you have an Athlon or Xeon processor, go into usr/src/test/sysperf, do make, and the resulting /tmp/mem1 program will probably give interesting results, which you can then post to the kernel mailing list. A caveat from Matt Dillon:

“Note however that you have to manually edit which copy tests it does since it bus fault if you try to run the XMM (SSE2) test on a machine without SSE2 :-)”