I’ve committed a partial section on installation in docs, which – if we’re lucky – will be completely superseded by a DragonFly installer program.
Joerg Sonnenberger has updated the bktr(4) driver to match what’s current in FreeBSD, including a new msp driver (from Linux), and support for the Terratec TValue, which was submitted by Patrick Mauritz.
cc3 has been switched back to stabs output, temporarily until DWARF2 support comes into gdb5 or DragonFly gets gdb6.
Brock Johnson submitted and Eirik Nygaard committed version 3.8.3 of tcpdumpand 0.8.3 of libpcap
‘walt’ found and Chris Pressey fixed a bug in the port system that could cause some ports to fail building with a error similar to ‘cd: can't cd to &&‘. Extraneous text was being inserted by the ‘build-depends-list’ and ‘run-depends-list’ targets.
A number of people have noticed problems with sendfile(2); especially with Apache. Jeffrey Hsu’s fixed it already.
Matt Dillon’s added fsstress in src/test/stress/fsstress. This tool has been found useful before.
Commit message quoted here:
“Add the filesystem/NFS stress tester program, adapted for BSD by Jordan H ubbard of Apple, originally written by Silicon Graphics, Inc, and modified by many people, including the SUSE Linux project.”
Matt Dillon has found further problems with the mmx/xmm/FP code, and committed fixes for them, describer further in the changelog for various file. (The one linked is one of several changed.)
If you built a kernel between now and April 29th, it’d be a good idea to do a full update and buildworld/buildkernel.
I’ve added my documentation work to the framwork that Hiten Pandya put together. I’ve committed sections on backups, X Windows, ports, and upgrading. You can see the current HTML output at http://www.forknibbler.com/guide/.
David Rhodus has removed the system notes and checks for performing an a.out to elf upgrade. Old cruft, gone.
Thanks to Matt Emmerton’s conversion work and my commit, the logo_saver KLD now shows the DragonFly logo instead of the BSD beastie. (Chuck’s gone to “bsdlogo”.)
Eirik Nygaard has added less version 381.
Eirik Nygaard has updated the One True awk in DragonFly to version 20040207. This temporarily broke the buildworld process, so if you tried a buildworld this afternoon and it failed with awk, it should now work. (Fixed by David Rhodus.)
David Rhodus has added the twa(4) driver, for the 3Ware Escalade 9000 series storage controller, based on Vinod Kashyap’s version in FreeBSD.
Eirik Nygaard has committed diffutils 2.8.1 into the tree. This is similar to previous third-party software additions in that DragonFly-specific changes are managed through additional patches to original code, not by creating a DragonFly-only version of diffutils. Future upgrades are made much more easy using this method.
Based on a patch from Tobias ‘ibotty’ Florek, Eirik Nygaard has set DragonFly to build only Brian Kernighan’s One True awk. gawk, the GNU version of awk, is out. I’ll just take a geek moment here and point out Kernighan’s “The Practice of Programming” is one of my favorite computer books ever.
Matt Dillon has added negative caching for NFS, meaning that NFS will now cache failed lookups, not just successful ones. He details the benefits like so:
“This makes a HUGE difference for programs which search nfs directories, such as compilers (the header file search path),
make, and a few other utilities. NFS packet traffic can be reduced upwards of 90%. For example, with/usr/srcmounted via NFS, building libc a second time without negative caching generates 66000 packets of NFS traffic in each direction, building libc a second time with negative caching enabled generates 9500 packets worth of NFS traffic, in EACH DIRECTION. While it is true that negative lookups are cached on the NFS server, the huge reduction in network traffic and equivalent reduction in synchronous read latencies result in radically reduced overheads across the board for operations which generate a lot of negative hits. A buildworld test with the default 3 second negative caching timeout went from 2265 seconds to 1900 seconds.”
Hiten Pandya has created a doc framework similar to the FreeBSD docs, though not yet as deep. If you are itching to contribute, and don’t want to code, this is an excellent alternative.
… And there’s already XIO material showing up. Matt Dillon reports doubled performance for CAPS IPC just by using the new XIO code.
Dheeraj Reddy submitted (and David Rhodus committed) C versions of which, whereis, makewhatis, and catman, removing yet another Perl dependency.
Andre Nathan submitted (and Matt Dillon committed) a change for route from NetBSD/OpenBSD that a ‘route show‘ command, which performs nearly the same as netstat -rn. Matt Dillon also added a -w option so that all columns would print full size.