Jim Brown asked about using the DragonFly logo, and as part of his request described (slightly) the BSD Professional certification exam, and how they are testing.
Two things:
- If you are running DragonFly 2.7, Matthew Dillon has made some kernel changes, so updating your 2.7 machine will require a full buildworld cycle, not quickworld.
- The binary packages for 2.6 and 2.7 have been updated to pkgsrc-2010Q2. This means that pkg_radd will automatically pull down newer packages, and you should make sure your /usr/pkgsrc is using the pkgsrc-2010Q2 release if you want to be sure there’s no version mismatches.
I recently sent out a description of what built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 , though the section on not changing the stable link is no longer true.
Anyone want to implement TCP-MD5? (RFC2385, among others.) David BÉRARD would find it useful.
Nikolai Lifanov has created a DragonFly hosting service. It’s vkernel-based, with a variety of options in disk and RAM. It’s at http://dflyhost.net/. (added to the links here, too)
Link dumps just so I can get caught up.
- Michael Lucas was interviewed about his new Network Flow Analysis (previously reviewed) book, in two parts. Also, he’s speaking at NYCBSDCon, this November 12th-14th.
- Dru Lavigne gave a talk on “Getting Started in an Open Source Community“. (via) In other video news, MeetBSD 2010 videos are available now.
- Random Google searches turned up a DragonFly installation video on Via hardware.
- Back to convention items: Kirk Russell has a short BSDCan recap. (via)
- Also, cluster ssh.
- Stathis Kamperis updated DragonFly’s One True Awk. (Huh. Brian Kernighan’s not at Bell Labs anymore.)
Matthew Dillon posted a summary of recent bugfixes in HAMMER and kqueue, which means if you are running a version of bleeding edge DragonFly build in the last few weeks, you should update.
He also mentions a “significant improvement in performance” in disk encryption. How significant? Over three times as fast.
Matthew Dillon sent an email to the kernel list detailing the performance improvements that he and Alex Hornung have recently made to dm_crypt and opencrypto. The disk encryption work does still come with a warning, however.
Matthew Dillon reports that DragonFly now has a catastrophic recovery tool for HAMMER filesystems, with pertinent details.
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.
You have probably seen reports declaring the demise of OpenSolaris by now, many taking a less than conservative approach in reporting the news one way or the other. So what do you make of the news? By all accounts, the source code (including future changes) for things such as ZFS will continue to be published under the CDDL. Will Oracle closing up development make it impossible for operating systems like FreeBSD to maintain ZFS without forking it? What do you think the ramifications will be for DragonFly’s HAMMER and DragonFly in general?
DSCHED_FQ was added to GENERIC, making it the default disk scheduling policy for master. You might want to refresh your memory of dsched and the fairq policy with some prior details and benchmarks.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out in the comments, adding DSCHED_FQ to GENERIC does not make it the default, but you no longer have to load the fairq module. Which raises the question, should fairq be the default?
The libevent library has been removed from the repository to ease the maintenance burden. There is some additional rationale in this tracker issue.
Matthew Dillon made a minor change to HAMMER that would help any future deduplication work. There’s also a deduplication code bounty out on the recently-updated Code Bounties page…
I’ve been NAS-shopping, and I’ve found that deduplication ability seems to add an extra zero on the end of a device’s price tag. It would be very nice for HAMMER.
Binary packages built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 are available now via pkg_radd or directly. Make sure to read my lengthy post for exact details.
On pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org, Greg Troxel proposed getting rid of gimp-print and associated packages. It’s been superseded by gutenprint-lib, so it may be worth switching now for the newer printer drivers, even if the package isn’t eliminated.
Matthew Dillon’s updated his iphdr branch of DragonFly, and he’s looking for testers. In this version, IP headers aren’t switched to host byte order, reducing complexity. If you like transmitting data, this would be a good one to test.
Jan Lentfer’s looking for code review; specifically these patches. It’s for pfsync and carp, part of his recent pf upgrade.
Jan Lentfer has updated pf (and pflogd and ftp-proxy) in DragonFly to match what was in OpenBSD 4.1. Why this intermediate step? pf went through a lot of changes after OpenBSD 4.1, so this was easier than jumping right to the current version – which he plans next.
In any case, this was a huge and difficult job, with somewhere around 10,000 lines of code added, and very useful for DragonFly. Jan also managed to keep the DragonFly-specific features working, where “no state” is the default, along with features like fairq.
Stathis Kamperis was looking for a way to list all disk devices and the associated serial numbers. Matthew Dillon described a manual way to find it. That manual method could be turned into a single shell script, if anyone wanted a small shell programming task.