It looks like 2.8 will be showing up in a few weeks – mid-October. If things go well, we’ll have prebuilt pkgsrc-2010Q3 binaries to go with it.
Venkatesh Srinivas (whee!) has written up a lengthy post about his idlezero work. It provides a nice peek into recent work, and how parts of DragonFly work. I’d normally save it for a Lazy Reading entry, but I don’t want to wait that long. It should hopefully show up on the dragonflybsd.org site too.
Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.
Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip. It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list. It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.
‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager. The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.
In an effort to support a new system with an AMD 880G chipset, Matthew Dillon has updated the AHCI driver. If you have SATA drives using AHCI, please test. (with any chipset, not just 880G.)
I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted. Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process. (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)
Sascha Wildner has brought in some changes to twa(4), for various 3ware RAID controllers, from FreeBSD. Also, YONETANI Tomokazu has added PCI IDs fixed up files for Adaptec ServeRAID 7x ips (4) devices.
Two recent changes in the way virtual kernels are constructed should make a speed difference. The startup time is reduced (and more memory can be given to the vkernel), and the overall running speed should be quicker, too.
DragonFly’s version of pf (corresponding with OpenBSD’s 4.2 version) is now multiprocessor safe, to match the network stack. pf itself isn’t using multiple processors; it’s just able to work without causing problems in an otherwise MPSAFE environment, thanks again to Jan Lentfer. Note that there’s one minor caveat.
Swapoff has been added to DragonFly. This was a potential Summer of Code project, and also happened to have a bounty offered for it. $300 goes to Ilya Dryomov. If money for code like this interests you, check the Code Bounties page for more projects…
Dear universe: improved interrupt routing, or deduplication in HAMMER would make me happy. I’m not picky.
Due to changes in networking, most of the wireless drivers in 2.7 stopped working a few days ago. Joe Talbott’s “brought back” iwi, ral, and wi. If you’re running 2.7 and using one of those drivers, it should be safe, relatively, to upgrade to a newer 2.7.
A little work has snowballed into even more of the network systems in DragonFly being pulled apart in order to get rid of the Giant Lock. It may delay the 2.8 release by a week or two, but it’s already paying dividends, such as NFSv3 now performing at maximum physically possible speeds on gigabit Ethernet.
(I ran out of alliterative words, sorry.) Venkatesh Srinivas has committed his work on memory allocation; his commit message has details. He’s kindly provided a link to the article that inspired the per-thread magazine work. He’s also provided graphs to show comparative performance benefits of his new memory allocator on DragonFly and on FreeBSD.
Jan Lentfer has now updated pf in DragonFly to version 4.2, on top of his earlier work to get to 4.1. This upgrade apparently doubles speed from 4.1, plus he’s brought in some other, later fixes. Thanks for doing a superhuman amount of work, Jan!
Well, technically not ripped out, just serialized roughly. This means if you update your DragonFly 2.7 machine in the next few days, the wireless drivers may not work, except for (I think) ath(4). They should return, better, by next week.
Apparently the recently committed support for Areca RAID cards came with some help directly from Areca, facilitated by Venkatesh Srinivas. Perhaps next time you’re searching for a RAID card, consider Areca in light of the effort they are willing to contribute for an open-source project…
David BÉRARD has an patch for TCP-MD5 support; if this interests you, please test.
A familiar procedure in any open source project: irritation causes improvement. In this case, the Forth-based boot loader irritated Matthew Dillon into writing a new replacement C-based one. (See the commit too, and it may slightly affect the upgrade process for 2.7 users.)
All these recent locking changes seem to be adding up to a much more responsive system, incidentally.
There’s a whole lot of options for bmake, used in pkgsrc, and they aren’t immediately obvious. I’ve linked to a reference before, but it’s no longer at that location. However, I found a new link!
As I found out directly, upgrading from pkgsrc version 2010Q1 to 2010Q2 has a minor quirk: binary packages for 2010Q2 will refuse to install with an older version of pkg_install. Rebuild pkgtools/pkg_install to the 2010Q2 version and the problem will go away.