Michael Lucas is building jails on DragonFly, and his story of doing so works pretty well as a how-to guide.
John Marino’s moved GCC from 4.4.6 to 4.4.7, but you’ll have to see the changelog for details. Except it’s so new it isn’t listed… yet.
Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes that led to a 10% and then 20% gain (don’t know if that was cumulative or separate) in network speed for DragonFly. That’s great! It only has a noticeable effect if you’re on 10G Ethernet, though. The obvious answer to that: upgrade your network.
It’s out, titled “The Inevitability of IPv6”, and featuring an article by yours truly on the upcoming DragonFly release. (I thought it was already published? I’m not sure.)
Francois Tigeot recently presented a set of slides about Hammer at a recent Irill conference. PDFs of the slides are available at his site, in English and French.
DragonFly’s now on the BuildFarm list of Postgres test systems. (via Jan Lentfer in IRC)
Here’s some recent x86_64 bulk builds: one on DragonFly 2.11, one on NetBSd 5.0.2, and one on Linux 2.6.37.4. Some data of note: DragonFly is within 8%-ish total packages built compared to NetBSD, which could be considered the baseline. Linux, the more common platform for most of the software built, is another step less. I don’t know if there’s any dramatic conclusion to get from this other than, “Hey, a lot of packages build on DragonFly!”
Samuel Greear graphed the performance differences for Postgres and MySQL on DragonFly, before and after the recent VM changes. Note that 1: this was done a little while ago, so I think the performance difference would be even greater now, and 2: this was graphed versus the already-performing-better 2.12, not the current stable release of 2.10.
Not a lot of links this week, for some reason.
- The best obituary I’ve seen yet for Dennis Ritchie, where he’s contrasted with Steve Jobs.
- The best paper abstract ever.
- Michael Lucas documents his DragonFly update.
- Our tcplay TrueCrypt implementation is getting noticed.
- pkgin-0.51 is available in pkgsrc-current, though it’s not in the most recent quarterly release.
Your unrelated comics link for the week: Oglaf. This week’s OK, but it’s frequently NSFW, and frequently hilarious.
Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects. DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done. However, we need ideas, the more the better. Please add whatever comes to mind.
That would be a recent ATI card, though I don’t know exactly which model name. Samuel Greear has imported David Shao’s DRM work, originally for Summer of Code, last year. Most newer Radeons should work (?).
There’s a rare crash in DragonFly 2.10, where applications would segfault. The system would run find. This is apparently more likely to happen in 2.12, though reports on this vary. It’s real, though.
Matthew Dillon went looking for this bug, and happened to roll back vm_token, the last lock in DragonFly that presented a serious impediment to multiprocessing. It’s a big patch. It fixes the problem, which is great! It also happens to make DragonFly buildworlds almost twice as fast depending on the number of cores in the system.
Holy crap we want to get that out… but it makes some significant changes to the system and needs to be tested. So, the next release probably won’t be for a few weeks.
If you want to help, build master and do something with it – move data, run server programs, whatever. Report crashes. This performance improvement is worth working for.
I know this happens normally, but I like to point out that it exists. From the recent pkgsrc-2011Q3 bulk build reports I posted, Samuel Greear found two problems to fix, and thanks to him and OBATA Akio, net/net-snmp and devel/poco are fixed for DragonFly.
I have some pkgsrc-2011Q3 builds done, for x86_64 and i386. I performed them on DragonFly 2.11, but they should work fine for 2.12/2.13. They’re uploading to the pkgsrc-2011Q3 folder on mirror-master, so you’ll need to set PKG_PATH correctly to use them via pkg_radd.
PKG_PATH=http://mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org/packages/x86_64/DragonFly-2.13/stable/
The x86_64 package upload is done, and I anticipate the i386 one will be done within the next 24 hours.
I did not realize this, but MMC/SD cards are not supported in the default DragonFly kernel. Or at least, they weren’t until now. (also committed to 2.12)
Update: PCI-based MMC/SD readers, specifically. USB ones were already recognized as umass devices.
They aren’t really release candidates per se, just “images I built from the 2.12 branch”, but they are available for testing.
There’s only two commits, already in DragonFly-current, to add to 2.12 before it’s clear of all listed release requirements. And maybe binary package builds… which I’m about 2/3 of the way through.
It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on hardware support being split up per-CPU, judging by this commit – one of many, recently.
Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.
There’s only one multiprocessing bottleneck left in DragonFly: vm_token. Matthew Dillon’s working on removing it, and he’s been testing his initial results on a 4-core machine and a 48-core machine, using heavily parallelized buildworlds to test concurrency. He’s posted the results, showing an initial speedup of up to 30%. This definitely isn’t going to make it into 2.12, but it’s looking good already. Keep in mind these are improvements on top of the performance graphed here yesterday.