A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you have a really old DragonFly system, meaning you’ve been upgrading it since version… 1.8 (I think?), you may have libpthread linked to libc_r instead of libxu. This means that if you have a system that old, you will now need to set THREAD_LIB or just recompile your pkgsrc programs on your next upgrade to something after DragonFly 2.10. I don’t think this is going to apply to a lot of people.
(I hope I got the lib details right…)
ipfilter has now been removed from DragonFly, by Sascha Wildner. We now have “only” ipfw2 and pf for software firewalls.
John Marino has updated the GNU Debugger (GDB) from version 7.0 to version 7.2. The lengthy commit message describes how surprisingly complex the upgrade proved to be.
And here’s one last writeup/introduction for Google Summer of Code projects on DragonFly: kevent part 2. (Apparently school exams prevented this from being written sooner.)
Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about Hammer, and how to implement clustering well enough to work as a sort of RAID replacement. He’s written up a document describing his plans. Some highlights:
It’s going to be a while before this “Hammer 2” becomes a finished product, though, so don’t count on it for the next release.
Tim Bisson has inital TRIM support working for UFS. His lengthy posting talks about how it’s done, and shows how much it speeds things up. He’s looking for testers, so please try it if you have a SSD. (The usual warnings apply about testing code that specifically deletes things.)
For those not familiar with TRIM in SSD context, here’s the least annoying page with an explanation that I could find in a few seconds of Googling.
John Marino’s gone on a tear and updated GCC to version 4.4.6, diffutils from 2.87 to 3.0, and texinfo from 4.8 to 4.13. Each commit message that I linked to has plenty of notes on what’s different, so they’re worth following. This is the first update for texinfo in 6 years, so the quantity of updates is not surprising.
Kedar Soparkar applied for Google Summer of Code with DragonFly, but didn’t make the cut with the very few slots we have. So, he’s going to work on his i386 ABI implementation anyway. More student work is always wonderful news.
Chatoor Kalki posted about his desire to learn about this whole UNIX/BSD/DragonFly thing, and there were several followups that may be useful to anyone interested in some reading.
Then use the new LINT64 config added by Sascha Wildner. LINT kernels have every option turned on, so it’s pretty easy to have problems due to conflicts or untested parts and so on. You probably won’t get a kernel out of it, but now there’s a comprehensive list of your 64-bit kernel options for when you’re building a kernel that works.
Rui-Xiang Guo is looking for testers for wip/chromium. That’s the zippy Google browser. He especially wants DragonFly users – this would be useful, especially since I think Firefox 4 does not build on DragonFly right now.
Two more of the DragonFly and Google Summer of Code projects: Irina Presa’s checkpointing vkernels, where you can save a running virtual kernel and start it again later, and Nick Prokharau’s port of PUFFS.
(Anyone know the HTML character code for ‘s’ with an inverted grave mark so I can spell Irina’s name correctly?)
Yay acronyms! Brills Peng was accepted for the Summer of Code project “Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy” – and now there’s a nice writeup describing what’s planned. Also, Stéphanie Ouillon did the same thing for the virtio drivers project. Adam Hoka also joined in with a summary for his LVM mirror project. Please keep this up, students.
If you are a European resident, Federico Biancuzzi has the DRAGONFLYBSD.IT domain name available to donate. He doesn’t want to let it go and have it taken by a domain squatter. Talk to him at sale@securitydaemon.com if you want to hold on to it for some unspecified time.
Francois Tigeot did some testing of various hardware RAID adapters (Areca, LSI, 3ware, and Adaptec) in DragonFly, and reported thoroughly on each. This may come as no surprise, but it sounds like Areca adapters are worth the money.
Update: There’s an updated mpt(4) driver, and the performance issues are fixed by enabling write caching.
GNU grep on DragonFly has been updated from version 2.4d to 2.7. Other BSDs have switched/will switch to bsdgrep, but as John Marino points out in his commit message, GNU grep’s still faster. He’s also brought in NetBSD’s version of sort, to replace the GNU flavor. I don’t know why on that one.
Peter Avalos also updated file to 5.06.
It’s out! See the 2.10 release page for the startlingly extensive list of updates in this version. Download images from the mirrors, or follow these steps (using a 2.10 version number) to build from source.
Google’s announced the accepted projects for 2011. DragonFly has 6 slots!
We had a large number of interesting project proposals; far more than than the slots available. If you’re one of the students who did not get in, please consider working on your project as time allows. I know it won’t be lucrative, but I’d still like to see them happen.
Here’s the list of accepted projects:
I did some comparative benchmarking between the 2.6, 2.8, and upcoming 2.10 release for DragonFly. As several people have guessed, performance has improved significantly, and the difference would probably be even more pronounced if I was using more modern hardware, e.g. swapcache or a system with AHCI. I have a mailing list post with details, and here’s the graph that sums it up:
(Sorry, no Lazy Reading this week. Life didn’t co-operate. At least there’s a pretty graph!)
We’ll have a full set of pkgsrc packages for the upcoming DragonFly 2.10 release, built from the most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc: 2011Q1. For the curious, here’s the build reports for i386 and for x86_64 architectures.