A bunch of new things arrived today:
Aggelos Economopoulos posted more details on his event tracing library, accompanied by a rash of commits. He’s interested in feedback.
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on idle page zeroing; his work has been committed, and if enabled, should contribute to a teeny speedup. What’s it do? It gets memory ready for use when the CPU is not otherwise busy, so that less time is needed to allocate that memory. It looks like there’s more work on the way, too.
As previously foreshadowed, BIND has been removed from the DragonFly base system. Instead, it’s installed from pkgsrc. Note that this includes tools like nslookup or host. Instructions after the jump.
… is one of the better commit message descriptions I’ve heard.
Sascha Wildner has ported MultiMedia Card support from FreeBSD; SD, SDHC, and MMC cards should work in DragonFly now. Man, there’s been a lot of new additions recently.
Alex Hornung’s I/O scheduler is now in DragonFly; all reports I’ve seen from users say it makes interactivity much better. It’s not on by default; read his very detailed post and followup for details.
‘dylanr’ has built 2 interesting films using Gource to visualize DragonFly development; he’s mentioned them in comments here, but I want to make sure people see them.
Update: see the full multi-year film of DragonFly commits linked in the comments by dylanr; thanks for doing this!
OpenSSL (which recently hit 1.0, though that’s not in DragonFly yet) has been patched to cover a recent security issue, thanks to Peter Avalos.
Jan Lentfer’s updated BIND to 9.5.2-P3, too.
Venkatesh Srinivas’s new sysctl, “debug.panic” is available for those who want to panic their machine on purpose, but don’t have direct access to the keyboard.
A problem found by Jan Lentfer and fixed by Matthew Dillon means that you can get a good performance boost if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly from the last month or so. Or, you can just wait a week for the 2.6 release.
DragonFly 2.6 has been branched, and should be released next week. Check the tag message for a list of the many, many commits.
YONETANI Tomokazu has eliminated cvsup, replacing it with net/csup from pkgsrc. The README notes that the pkgsrc package devel/cvsync is another alternative if you need to retrieve the repository and not just the checked out files..
Matthew Dillon has implemented what he calls “REDO” records in Hammer, which reduce the amount of time taken flushing data to disk. It’ll be in the 2.6 release, but it isn’t on by default.
Jordan Gordeev’s work on 64-bit vkernels has also been brought in, so virtual systems are now available for x86_64 users.
Matthew Dillon’s added some tools for building system snapshots, a previously custom process. Look at the README for details.
Alex Hornung has committed his initial work on Linux support, which is over 6,500 lines so far. (Thanks, Alex!) He’s continuing to work on it, though going by his commit message, Java, Opera, Tomcat, etc. are supported so far. The only major item missing at this point is Flash. There are other followups, such as this note about chrooting into the Linux subsystem.
“Device initiated power management” via AHCI is now possible, thanks to Johannes Hofmann. If I understand it correctly, it lets the computer handle power reductions automatically, which is more efficient than setting by hand.
Michael Neumann has added his port of the e1000 driver from FreeBSD, though he doesn’t recommend using it yet. He’s looking for testers who have this hardware.
OpenSSL version 0.9.8m has been imported by Peter Avalos; this version contains a bugfix for a security issue.