Matthew Dillon’s made some scheduler changes, which blogbench tests are showing give the default scheduler better performance under heavy load. It’s a pretty technical writeup, so I’ll just point you at it rather than attempt to summarize.
Matthew Dillon’s made some changes that will speed up the booting process for people with a ridiculous amount of memory, like 64G. This is x86_64 only, but that should not be a surprise if you think about it.
‘file’ has been updated to version 5.05 by Peter Avalos. file(1) is one of those utilities that I forget is a contributed, external piece of software, even though it’s been in Unix since 1973.
(file is one year older than me!)
Global tokens are now running without the giant lock in DragonFly. Neat! There’s still plenty more to remove, but this is a big step.
The default Hammer version in DragonFly is now version 5, which is the one that includes deduplication. Enjoy, bleeding-edge users! Otherwise, wait for the next release.
Version 6 is there, but don’t upgrade to it yet; there aren’t significant user-visible changes, and the usual disclaimers for new versions apply.
Ilya Dryomov has added live deduplication, or as he titles it, “efficient cp”. It’s experimental and turned on with a sysctl, so approach with caution.
Xerox Network Services is gone from DragonFly. Does anyone, anywhere, use this protocol? Ironically, I don’t recall this even being visible on the Xerox hardware products I have at work.
Another bus bites the dust: EISA is no more on DragonFly. I don’t know if there’s even any system that DragonFly could boot on and would use this. Still, remove your hats and enjoy a moment of silence.
Matthew Dillon fixed a rare and difficult-to-find bug on x86-64 Dragonfly. This means much more of the system can be run ‘MPSAFE’, or without the Giant Lock. Watch for this soon if you’re running 2.9.
Ed Smith was thinking of working on sysctl documentation, but as it turns out, a lot of it has already been done via Google Code-In; Samuel Greear recently committed a lot of it. (Though there’s more sysctl work possible.)
While on that topic, Samuel Greear also posted a lengthy summary of all the Code-In work done so far. We need more code-related tasks! The existing ones have been so popular that they’re all getting done, quickly.
Venkatesh Srinivas has created what he calls “Super Light Weight Reference Counting”, which he describes in a recent post, plus followup. He’s already converted sfbuf to use it.
As Matthew Dillon works on supporting his new 48-core system, he’s written some notes on power usage and scheduling/drivers that may be worth a read.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.8.4. The commit message has details on what’s changed (for us). This is good, since the libarchive site release notes seems to not be up to date.
Update: Peter helpfully pointed at contrib/libarchive/NEWS.
Peter Avalos has updated zlib to version 1.25, and appears to have done some work with tnftp, though this is the only message I saw.
Ironically, I get a “this site is using an unsupported form of compression” error when browsing to the zlib web site.