Nick Prokharau’s project for Google Summer of Code last year was “Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD”. Sascha Wildner has now committed that to DragonFly. It’s experimental, so the normal caveats apply.
John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile GCC 4.6 a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel to try this out.
Update: John Marino points out in comments that you need to set WORLD_CCVER, not CCVER as his original message said.
ISDN support has been removed from DragonFly. It was not useful at this point, because it’s rarely used any more. It does make me feel a little sad; this was the technology everyone said was the future before cable modems and DSL were figured out.
A bit of symmetry in that title, there. Old ATA, which was replaced years ago, is finally gone. This should affect nobody…
John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it. That’s great news! What is it? Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker. His commit message gives better details.
Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption. The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be. Matthias also found a contributed fix. Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.
Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM. I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.
What happens when you break enough things in DragonFly that you become a source of test cases? As Antonio Huete Jimenez (AKA “tuxillo” on IRC) found out, you get a stress test named after you.
Nuno Antunes has committed a large quantity of work on updating netgraph to version 7. His goal is to be able to run mpd5, though it’s not there yet. If you want to look at it, go to the monthly page and look around the 10th; there’s too much to link to individually.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0f; this is to fix 6 security issues identified in the OpenSSL changelog.
You may want to update for this – a lockup bug with the re(4) (RealTek 8xxx series) driver has been fixed.
dma, which originated on DragonFly, is now at version 0.7, and so is the version in DragonFly.
John Marino updated libm, bringing a large quantity of functions. This may be a stopgap measure for now. As a positive side effect, buffer overflow attacks are a bit harder now.
The recently discovered telnetd vulnerability has been fixed in DragonFly, thanks to Peter Avalos. Apparently it’s been around everywhere forever. (last link via xhr) Hopefully there aren’t that many people that still need a telnet daemon; SSH has run it out of town for the most part.
Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD apparently improve NFS write performance, though I don’t have numbers to show.
There’s been a rare segfault present in DragonFly for quite some time. It’s been difficult to reproduce, and the 2.12 release due some months ago was held up specifically to fix it. Matthew Dillon was, after many days (months?) of work, able to replicate it reliably and eventually find a way around what appears to be a new AMD-specific bug. Read his very detailed explanation of what he did to get to this point.
Francois Tigeot benchmarked his accounting work with blogbench, and posted a PDF with the results. Dmitrij D. Czarkoff made a simpler graph, which can be used to draw the conclusion: blogbench didn’t work well for estimating the impact of VFS accounting. If you want to try accounting yourself, put vfs.accounting_enabled="1" in your /boot/loader.conf.
(The normal DragonFly mailarchive isn’t updating because it feeds from DragonFly NNTP, and that’s not updating, so I’m using Gmane for post links.)
There is now a NO_BINUTILS221 option, added by Sascha Wildner, that will keep your system from building binutils 2.21 during a buildworld. The system will still build binutils 2.22, so there will still be a functioning ld on the system. Use this along with NO_GCC41 (so only gcc 4.4 gets built) to speed up your buildworlds, if you like.