The builds of pkgsrc-2011Q2 are finishing up, so we have/will have binaries to download, for those who don’t want to build from source. The uploads should be complete by now for everything except maybe 2.11/x86_64. You’ll have to change $PKG_PATH to point at the new directories for now, though. There’s also some build reports to look at.
I spied a bulk build of pkgsrc using clang. It’s interesting to see the results… It’s on NetBSD, but it should be possible to try the same thing with CCVER on DragonFly. Any takers?
Remember the benchmark tests I linked a few days ago? There’s been ongoing discussion about them, and a recent comment from Matthew Dillon sums it up pretty well: the benchmarks differ depending on whether you favor reads, or favor writes.
Thanks to Michael Neumann, there’s more supported Broadcom network card chipsets. There’s some wierdness in setup, though, so look at his commit message.
BSDday Argentina 2011 is happening the 4th and 5th of November, in Buenos Aires City, Argentina. The Call for Papers is out, if you’d like to contribute.
Tim Bisson has another status report on supporting TRIM in DragonFly. It supports UFS and Hammer slices, and trimming swap too. I’m not sure what else could be done; that sounds pretty complete to me… In any case, if you have a SSD, his code is available to try right now.
If you happen to use a LG P-500 smartphone to get online via USB, as ‘Romick’ does, he’s got a patch that makes that device work under DragonFly. (Sorry, the original users@ email seems to have gone missing.)
About a month from now (August 10-14), the CCC Camp is being held outside Berlin. Bring a tent and (I assume) something capable of getting a wireless connection. It only happens every 4 years, so jump on it now. There will be at least one DragonFly-using person there – Matthias Schmidt is going.
John Marino has made binutils 2.21.1 the default binutils in DragonFly, and gprof is now built but not in the default path.
Alex Hornung has made a pile of changes for disk encryption, including adding libdm, a “simple BSD-licensed libdevmapper“,and adding tcplay, a 100% compatible implementation of TrueCrypt. This should make you very happy if you like running from an encrypted disk.
Update: Alex has written an in-depth explanation of this work. It’s a huge change!
Update update: Hey, it’s showing on Hacker News too!
All 6 Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly have reached the midterm, and passed!
Francois Tigeot has repeated his benchmarking, this time changing out the CPU instead of the operating system. There’s still more graphs, yay!
Irina Pre?a has posted a nice summary of the Google Summer of Code project “Checkpointing vkernels.”
If you are a Summer of Code student or mentor, make sure you’ve filled out your midterm survey. Without it, your project fails – and they are due for everyone in roughly the next 24 hours!
Francois Tigeot tested a system under both FreeBSD and DragonFly using various RAID setups with arcmsr(4) and blogbench. Hooray for graphs! Like any good benchmark, it quickly went to discussion of how the test was conducted and how the various runs differ. (Follow the thread.)
The Google Summer of Code midterms are coming up, which generally means students get graded on a pass/fail basis for their work so far, and both mentors and students fill out surveys. What’s this mean? It means we’re halfway through six projects!
If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.11, it’s worth updating. Matthew Dillon fixed a networking bug that I’ve seen cause problems. It was introduced within 2.11’s lifetime, so as far as I know, this won’t affect anyone on 2.10.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q2, has been branched. There’s no formal announcement yet to describe the highlights, but I’ll link it when it shows up. I’ve already started building binary packages for DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.
I happened to stumble on this: the DuckDuckGo search engine will take you directly to a DragonFly man page, if you type ‘!dfman’ at the start of your query. For instance, “!dfman hammer“.
Sascha Wildner has enabled the CPU_ENABLE_EST option for x86_64 kernels. If you’re on x86_64, you can now use Enhanced Speedstep Technology. (i386 users already could.)