Sascha Wildner has updated the arcmsr(4) driver, for you Areca users out there. I think Areca was one of the vendors kind enough to test DragonFly on their hardware directly, so please consider them next time you are in the market for a SATA RAID card.
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.
Naoya Sugioka had trouble booting DragonFly on his Dell M4400. He updated ACPICA with this patch, and was able to boot. I link to it in case someone else with a recent Dell model (or perhaps just a laptop with the same chipset?) has the same issues.
Another point release for DragonFly 2.8 is planned, with a bunch of small updates, some of which have been covered here recently.
Jan Lentfer, who apparently has a high tolerance for pain, has now brought the kernel part of pf up to the equivalent of the OpenBSD 4.4 version, available for testing. It’s not yet committed. pfctl’s updated too.
Francois Tigeot was able to get wip/jdk15 to build on DragonFly, from pkgsrc-wip. Unfortunately, the package has been removed, but he’s looking to put it back.
If you have any last-minute suggestions for Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly, pass them along now – it starts Monday! Post them here, or in #dragonflybsd on EFNet IRC, or on the kernel@ mailing list. We have 34 already, but you can never have too many.
A number of people have encountered this: while installing some larger pkgsrc package, the process stops on a strange DocBook error. Alex Hornung has a fix: symlink /usr/pkg/etc/xml/catalog to /usr/pkg/share/xml/catalog.
It has multiple authors at this point starting with Chris Turner and moving to Siju George, but: the Flash setup is in the quickstart document. As I recall, someone put together a changed library for it that fixes a audio/video sync issue. Oh wait, I did find that before.
Alex Hornung is having trouble getting his power consumption as low as it could be on his DragonFly laptop. A side effect of this problem is that when he posts about it, he also manages to enumerate all the various ways you can reduce power consumption and heat usage on a laptop. (Follow the thread for more.)
If your system has trouble when APIC_IO is enabled, and you’re tracking DragonFly 2.9, you may have trouble on your next build. The fix is putting this in your loader.conf:
hw.apic_io_enable=0
I know this has already been covered, to some extent, but one can never be too clear with solutions.
Ilya Dryomov’s work on deduplication for Hammer has been committed to the tree in an early test form. I guess I need to pay up as part of the code bounty. If you’re wondering how much space it will save, but don’t want to try non-production code yet, there’s a ‘hammer dedup-simulate’ command that will estimate the saving ratio.
This is great news – deduplication is so valuable it adds an extra zero onto the price of any storage device that can do it.
Another day, another BSDTalk item: this time it’s 15 minutes with Matthew Dillon at MeetBSD, talking about the 2.8 release. It was recorded either today or yesterday – quite fresh.
Matthew happens to mention that experimental deduplication support will arrive next week in Hammer.