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.
APIC_IO is back as a kernel config option, though it just toggles the sysctl loader tunable default. This is so a kernel config file with that option still set won’t cause an error.
Matthew Dillon’s made several changes to improve support for AMD SB850 chipsets (for AHCI) and also for 880/890 chipsets. If you have one of these systems, it may be bootable/more reliable. Don’t start messing with the hot-plug capability yet, though.
Peter Avalos has committed his speedups for OpenSSL encryption (using assembly), along with a lot of numbers to show performance changes. It’s definitely sped up, but the quantity of values is so large that you’d have to visualize it differently to get a summary I could show here.
If you’re between 12 and 18 years of age, Google Code-In has started. There’s plenty of tasks available for DragonFly BSD, so jump in now! (or, well, wait a few days for the holiday if you’re a U.S. resident.)
Peter Avalos is working on having OpenSSL use assembly code. On i386, he reports initial rough results of blowfish working 15% faster, and DES doubling in speed. (seen via IRC.)
The utility pkg_add has a -u option that tells it to upgrade any existing matched package with a given binary package. Since pkg_radd passes options on to the underlying use of pkg_add, after automatically setting a remote repository for binary files, pkg_radd -u <packagename> tells pkg_add to automatically find and upgrade a package.
I never thought this would work. However, I’m building a package on a system that has pkgsrc-2010Q1 packages installed, but a pkgsrc-2010Q3 /usr/pkgsrc. Every time I’ve encountered an error because installed software was too low a version, pkg_radd -uv <package_name> has resulted in a quick upgrade.
I’m not recommending this as a new upgrade method; I’m noting how unexpectedly well this experiment is going. It may be just blind luck, but this sure would be nice if it ‘just worked’.
Peter Avalos is bringing in OpenSSL 1.0.0b. I’m not sure what the difference between 1.0.0b and 1.0.1 would be. Also, Alex Hornung has updated vn(4) – there’s more updates than the one I linked.