Michael Neumann has ported igb(4) and em(4), and he needs people with the corresponding hardware to test it. Those are network cards, if you aren’t familiar with those short names.
This one’s a few days old, but I’m still trying to catch up with all the events lately: swapcache now has two flags to control whether just meta-data or all data is cached for any given set of directories; caching everything is only worthwhile if the swapcache device can keep up with the resulting traffic.
This requires a rebuild of world, if you’re running 2.5 bleeding edge.
Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs port is now ready to go. It’s still considered experimental, but it’s worth trying. tmpfs(5) is different because it keeps data in RAM once, and pages out only when needed. This best-case scenario is an improvement to mount_mfs(8) and md(4), its predecessors.
It’s running now on pkgbox64 and already seems to be speeding up the bulk build process.
It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!
- PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel. The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
- Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default. This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
- An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
- In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs. In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size. Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’. (via) I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
- Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.
The installer now sets a /boot size of 768M by default; more space for kernels and modules, plus disks these days can take it.
Incidentally, if you’re compiling new versions of your kernel, it’s a good idea to copy your kernel file to kernel.good, and then use that to boot if the version you then compile doesn’t work. Someday, that will totally save you.
Guy Harris found a problem with non-blocking reads from a BPF device that’s common to DragonFly, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. It’s fixed in DragonFly.
Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer: Constantine A. Murenin. He’s responsible for the sensors framework, and is already busy.
Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work has been added, with some further changes. There’s a skeletal man page to look at.
NFS on DragonFly now defaults to readdirplus mounts, which improves directory read speeds. Testing for speed and compatibility is advised.
Jan Lentfer has updated wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and while there’s already some postive reports, he’d like more testing in the wild. Give it a run if you’re already using the prior version.
Matthew Dillon is setting up DragonFly to be able to use a fast disk (like a SSD) for disk cache, reducing the effect swap has on speed. This means very large amounts of data could be read into memory – greater than the available RAM in the system – without having the normal paging out problems that happen when memory is exhausted. It’ll work for any filesystem on the machine – HAMMER, UFS, or NFS. His inital notes have more. Other notes include details on the NFS benefits, and possibilities with SSDs. Wear-leveling may make SSDs last much longer.
Work has started, and there’s an update (with examples) that people can try, though it may destroy all your data at this point. Test results in that update show, if I’m reading it right, a better than doubling of speed on a repeated md5 test on a large file when using the new caching system. This should be a huge benefit.
There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!
- Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it. He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on the way too.
- Binary pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.4.x/i386 are all uploaded.
- I finished a build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.5.x/x86_64 – take a look and fix some of the broken items, if that interests you.
- Weekend reading: check out this Trivium post as there’s some interesting historical items. I may try that LackRack idea in a environment that doesn’t fit a normal rack well…
BIND has been updated by Jan Lentfer, fixing two recent vulnerabilities. His note about the update has a link to vulnerability info, for the curious. Along the same lines, Jeremy C. Reed is looking for others using DNSSEC, just to see how widespread it is.
Matthew Dillon has a summary of the development work he’s done over the past week or so. The condensed version: things faster, bugs fixed. Generally what you want to hear.
Jan Lentfer’s committed support for DNSSEC. It’s supported by default, meaning you can use it right now on a 2.5.1+ system. He’s tested it locally using these instructions, which I link to for everyone’s edification. Is this important? A lot of people seem to think so.
Peter Avalos has added the HPN patch for OpenSSH; the commit message notes changes and links to a page with far more detail and acronyms than I can easily fit in a post.
That didn’t take long: Matthew Dillon has an update on his REDO work; he’s about halfway there. His summary includes instructions on how to test this new work, including ways to change how Hammer syncs to disk.