I really just like that phrase and the action movie feeling of using it, like “Watch out! The pulse-width modulated time-domain multiplexer is targeting us!” Sorta like a PU-36 space modulator. It’s actually a recently-committed mechanism to improve write performance in Hammer, but my idea sounds more exciting.
John Marino has made binutils 2.21.1 the default binutils in DragonFly, and gprof is now built but not in the default path.
Alex Hornung has made a pile of changes for disk encryption, including adding libdm, a “simple BSD-licensed libdevmapper“,and adding tcplay, a 100% compatible implementation of TrueCrypt. This should make you very happy if you like running from an encrypted disk.
Update: Alex has written an in-depth explanation of this work. It’s a huge change!
Update update: Hey, it’s showing on Hacker News too!
If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.11, it’s worth updating. Matthew Dillon fixed a networking bug that I’ve seen cause problems. It was introduced within 2.11’s lifetime, so as far as I know, this won’t affect anyone on 2.10.
Sascha Wildner has enabled the CPU_ENABLE_EST option for x86_64 kernels. If you’re on x86_64, you can now use Enhanced Speedstep Technology. (i386 users already could.)
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.
Do you have a Via CPU? Do you use padlock(4)? (The driver for cryptographic functions, which Via processors support with hardware acceleration) Alex Hornung made some untested changes to support the hardware random number generator, but he needs people to test it.
Venkatesh Srinivas is making vmobj_token and vm_token much more fine-grained. That’s great, but watch out over the next few weeks as this work goes into 2.11. (i.e. don’t upgrade your DragonFly 2.11 unless you are ready for surprises.) Venkatesh has already found some.
The i386 architecture now supports LAPIC and I/O APIC. If you had weird interrupt problems when installing DragonFly before, now might be a good time to try the latest bleeding-edge version of DragonFly and see if the problem vanished.
John Marino has made it possible to use ‘gold‘, the new linker in binutils 2.21, on DragonFly. His explanatory post outlines the benefits (much faster C++ compiling), and caveats (does not work yet for building world/kernel).
It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on getting multiprocessor kernels able to boot on single-processor systems. This makes life a bit easier, since there’s only one kernel needed for any given processor. I don’t know if it’s in a finished state yet.
Thanks to John Marino, the one dependency needing libgnuregex is gone, as is the software itself. I didn’t even know libgnuregex was there.
If you have a really old DragonFly system, meaning you’ve been upgrading it since version… 1.8 (I think?), you may have libpthread linked to libc_r instead of libxu. This means that if you have a system that old, you will now need to set THREAD_LIB or just recompile your pkgsrc programs on your next upgrade to something after DragonFly 2.10. I don’t think this is going to apply to a lot of people.
(I hope I got the lib details right…)
ipfilter has now been removed from DragonFly, by Sascha Wildner. We now have “only” ipfw2 and pf for software firewalls.
John Marino has updated the GNU Debugger (GDB) from version 7.0 to version 7.2. The lengthy commit message describes how surprisingly complex the upgrade proved to be.
John Marino’s gone on a tear and updated GCC to version 4.4.6, diffutils from 2.87 to 3.0, and texinfo from 4.8 to 4.13. Each commit message that I linked to has plenty of notes on what’s different, so they’re worth following. This is the first update for texinfo in 6 years, so the quantity of updates is not surprising.
Then use the new LINT64 config added by Sascha Wildner. LINT kernels have every option turned on, so it’s pretty easy to have problems due to conflicts or untested parts and so on. You probably won’t get a kernel out of it, but now there’s a comprehensive list of your 64-bit kernel options for when you’re building a kernel that works.
GNU grep on DragonFly has been updated from version 2.4d to 2.7. Other BSDs have switched/will switch to bsdgrep, but as John Marino points out in his commit message, GNU grep’s still faster. He’s also brought in NetBSD’s version of sort, to replace the GNU flavor. I don’t know why on that one.
Peter Avalos also updated file to 5.06.
Thomas Nikolajsen has put together more information on Hammer, including formatting and the new deduplication features, conveniently located in the man pages and some other spots.