A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Tim Darby had an error with a particular AMD AHCI chipset, and the entertaining error was:
Attempting to reinitialize the port after it had a horrible accident
This gives me a chance to link to one of my favorite error messages ever.
(The chipset works in current DragonFly, by the way.)
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.
Matthew Dillon has made it possible to boot DragonFly on 24-CPU systems. Also, we’re currently limited to 32G of RAM. Oh, to have such limitations; I was considering myself lucky to have 4 CPUs.
Francois Tigeot has wip/jdk15 working for DragonFly/x86_64. It’s not there yet for i386…
There’s now descriptions for a number of the net.inet.* sysctls, thanks to Taras Klaskovsky as part of Google Code-In.
Tim Darby was looking to take advantage of swapcache, and got some advice from Matthew Dillon. This led to a larger writeup that went into the mechanics and advantages of both swapcache and SSDs. The swapcache(8) page has been expanded with these notes, and I’m sure I need to buy a SSD for my next upgrade.
SSD devices have tumbled into the sub-$100 range for smaller devices; they are perfect for swapcache if you’ve got the spare SATA connector…
Another Google Code-In task completed: passwords are now created using SHA256 (PDF link) by default, and libcrypt also now supports SHA512.
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
Sascha Wildner has added even more RAID controller support, from FreeBSD, this time in improvements to the amr(4) driver. Check the green lines in this man page diff to see what’s new.
Another piece of work by one of the fine students participating in Google Code-In is a new 2.8 installation screencast/video. Check it out at the following link:
DragonFly BSD 2.8 Installation Screencast on YouTube
If you have been following along but have not yet tried DragonFly, this should evidence how easy it is — wait not a second longer!
The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.
There’s a minute and a half of video up of NYCBSDCon 2010, showing off the nice facilities, food, and some of the talks. (via) You can see me shifting around in my seat at 1:28.
Sascha Wildner has brought in the mfi(4) and mfiutil(8) drivers from FreeBSD, adding support for a number of different RAID controllers – including the Dell PERC 5 and PERC 6.
Rui-Xiang Guo has brought chromium, the base of Google’s speedy Chrome web browser, into pkgsrc, in the wip branch. He’s looking for testers of the work, especially on DragonFly. Please try it and report!
DragonFly versions >=2.6 and ipfw don’t seem to get along for doing network address translations. I’ve posted about this before, but I’m linking again because this time I have the explicit config lines written out.
I should probably create a pf category…
Several Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly have already been claimed and finished – a regression test and desktop documentation, plus others I haven’t been involved in.
The contest runs through January and is open to anyone 13-18, with Google paying per task. Hopefully we’ll have enough tasks to make it the full time, as it’s more popular than I anticipated.
Alex Hornung has added the basic work for dmirror, a software RAID-1 implementation into the tree, along with a concept description from Matthew Dillon. It’s not ready for use yet; ready for development, though.
Siju George noticed that his mouse would stop working in X, perhaps every hour. Restarting X would fix it, but he didn’t have a clear cause. Antonio Huete Jimenez suggested turning the sysctl ‘debug.psm.loglevel’ to 9 to at least see what messages cropped up, and that seemed to fix it. I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution, but it’s worth mentioning in case this odd bug bites someone else.
Please welcome our newest committer: Ilya Dryomov. He’s already responsible for deduplication code for Hammer, so now he can work directly.
Tomas Bodzar found robotpkg, a pkgsrc-based collection of robotics-related software. Because of its pkgsrc origins, it should in theory work with DragonFly, or most anything.