APIC support has been updated, so not only will some machines work better/at all with a multiprocessor kernel, more machines will boot. Not only that, but Sepherosa Ziehau has a newer version of ACPI and interrupt routing available. This is wonderful news! We’ve needed this update for some time.
My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available. Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change. I’m starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.
For the curious, or for those who plan ahead, I posted what’s on the Google Summer of Code student application for DragonFly.
If you were thinking of working on a disk scheduler for DragonFly, this is your lucky day! Brills Peng asked for some overall guidance on how to start on a Summer of Code project. I threw out some general tips, Alex Hornung talked up resources on kernel programming, and Venkatesh Srinivas described exactly what you’d need to write a disk scheduler. There’s about 50% of a whole proposal, prewritten.
We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year! (yay!)
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
If you want to mentor, apply here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.) I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. Signing up to mentor does not mean you must mentor if there aren’t any projects that interest you; it does mean you need to review applications and provide feedback for students March 28th – April 8th.
If you want to be a student with DragonFly:
Check the projects page for ideas:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/
… or come up with your own.
Get your application together by March 28th. Start talking about it on the mailing list or IRC or however as soon as you can; there’s a direct relationship between the amount of preparation we see beforehand and people getting accepted.
Here’s the timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline
Copied from my email to users@/kernel@, cause it has everything you need.
A new page has popped up on the DragonFly website: How to Port to DragonFly. The work is very thorough, and the author is ‘srussell’, which I think is Stéphane Russell? Thanks, person who I may be misidentifying!
Edit: corrected name spelling
Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wish I knew more about kqueue!” Well, here’s a link (PDF) from Vlad GALU that can help with that.
dragonflybsd.org is down right now, so if you’re looking for the Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly, I have a local mirror of that page.
Update: dragonflybsd.org is back up, but I’ll keep that mirror there just in case…
This month’s issue of BSD Magazine is titled “The Wonders of Blender”, but there’s a lot more articles in there with other topics. There’s a two-page spread of DragonFly news that may look familiar to readers of this site…
Venkatesh Srinivas performed the fefe.de ‘scalability’ benchmarks, which have been mentioned here before. He performed it on different hardware and only with DragonFly, so it’s not really for comparison but rather for analysis. However: graphs!
Matthew Dillon added some system tunables to match these microbenchmarks, and then changed the values. The benchmarks looked better, but according to him you wouldn’t want to run a system normally with those values.
Did you know that Euraeka, a news search site, runs on DragonFly? I did not. Now we both do!
There’s two recent changes for pkgsrc and DragonFly:
- DragonFly-current (2.9) now pulls the most recent pkgsrc quarterly release (2010Q4) by default, instead of pkgsrc-current. This means more packages will be working with the default setup, plus pkg_radd and other tools will be pulling the same ‘generation’ of software.
- The DragonFly/git version of pkgsrc can now be created as a shallow clone. This means less file history, but also means a much faster download.
Jaime Fournier ran a Ruby benchmark against the various BSDs. (noted via IRC and here) DragonFly came out scoring very well. However! I don’t really know what these benchmarks are testing, since I haven’t used Ruby or these tests before. Jaime seems to be planning more tests.
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010 is online, in video form. I got to see this as it happened, and it was a excellent talk. Mr. Lucas is able to put some reasonable arguments together as to the why of things, since he’s been published multiple times, plus his sense of humor keeps it moving.
Hey, wait – there’s more from the conference on BSD TV! How did I miss this? Hopefully even more will show up; the facility was perfect for recording.
Joe Talbott has some changes for both Intel and non-Intel wifi NICs; please try out his branch and report the results.
Sascha Wildner has changed the default compiler to gcc 4.4. See his commit notes for some details. To my knowledge, we’re the only BSD using this recent a version.
A full buildworld/buildkernel is probably the best strategy. I’ll be rebuilding all the pkgsrc packages for 2.9 using gcc 4.4… This will take at least a week.
I forgot to mention it when I did this opening night, but: DragonFly’s application to Google Summer of Code 2011 is in. We find out if we’re accepted on the 18th.
If you’re curious, I have a bulk build on DragonFly 2.9/x86_64/pkgsrc-current finished. Work on the programs that don’t build is always welcome. It’s pretty good for bleeding-edge, though!
… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program. (Often called “pushing patches upstream”) That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project. That tracking down can be a majority of the work. In that case: thanks, Rumko!
Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke! He did the same thing for pcc.
It’s not even released yet, but John Marino and Sascha Wildner have been laying the foundation for using gcc 4.6 in DragonFly. gcc 4.6 looks to have some new things in it; more Objective-C support and Go, too, based on my quick perusal of the gcc website.