NFS faster

Matt Dillon has committed code that increases the default socket buffer for NFS to
65535 bytes. This can be changed with the sysctl ‘vfs.nfs.soreserve’. This should improve performance.

DragonFly at AsiaBSDCon

The USENIX AsiaBSDCon is happening March 13th and 14th. Jeffrey Hsu, who has been working on DragonFly networking (with a good number of commits lately) will be giving a talk titled: “Concepts, Theory, and Implementation of DragonflyBSD”.

Perl debased

In an ongoing discussion of Chris Pressey’s proposed config(8) changes, Matt Dillon said Perl should be removed from the base system, at some point.

Cleaning out

Perl is no longer required for building a i386 kernel, thanks to Eirik Nygaard. It may also not be required for other platforms, but it’s only been tested on i386 as of right now.

Config(8) changes

Chris Pressey posted his thoughts on config(8). His summary on his plans are thus: “Basically: config(8) shouldn’t let you configure a kernel that won’t build. It should detect that it won’t build, tell you why, and stop immediately without wasting your time with a make session that is doomed to failure.

ProPolice and gcc3

If you update your sources and compile using gcc3, it now includes stack smashing protection, committed by Joerg Sonnenberger. Compiling using gcc2 already includes that protection.

It gets better, later

Joerg Sonnenberger has added an infrastructure for contrib/. Previously, in FreeBSD, 3rd-party software in the base installation would be modified from its original state to work with FreeBSD 4 (and hence DragonFly). These modifications are then repeated with each new version of the third-party software. (gcc 2.95 -> gcc 3.x, for instance.) The “new and improved” method keeps the original source for the 3rd-party software and keeps all DragonFly-specific changes in separate patch files. This is harder to set up, but better in the long run. This methodology has already been used for certain software like gcc and binutils.

Up and down

For those of you who multiboot or like carving their disk to bits, Matt Dillon has doubled the possible partitions (8 -> 16) and decreased the number of slices possible. (32 -> 16) You will need to rebuild world and kernel, and install the new boot code with disklabel -B in order to take advantage of this.