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 It’s been superseded by gutenprint-lib, so it may be worth switching now for the newer printer drivers, even if the package isn’t eliminated.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.
Among other things, Joe Talbott has brought in support for the 6000 and 6050 series of iwn(4) wifi devices.
Samuel Greear has even more benchmarks for his kqueue work. This time, he took an example server from Unix Network Programming, and tested various permutations. His post has the relative timings for each server type.
Sascha Wildner brought in FreeBSD’s stress2 stress testing suite. It’s an efficient way to crash your system. Look at the README to find out the fastest way there.
Samuel J. Greear posted a note about his Summer of Code work, focusing on selective wakeup. He outlined his strategy, and then posted benchmark numbers – using Apache, lighthttpd, and a minimal web server he wrote just to show the improvements from selective wakeup.
Matthew Dillon has added ALTQ to the GENERIC (and X86_64_GENERIC) kernels, since there’s no module version to add later. Make sure to include it in your custom configs, if desired.
(I always worry that I’ll miss some new kernel option when upgrading, but also don’t want to go over my whole kernel config just in case.)
Sascha Wildner has pulled in a bunch of updates for twa(4), adding more devices for this SATA RAID device driver. There’s a list of what’s supported now on the man page.
Samuel J. Greear just updated his recent kqueue work with some fixes. If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.7, you should update to catch what it fixes.
Matthew Dillon created a new Features page on the DragonFly site; it lists the technologies added to DragonFly from over the past few years.
The logs from regular DragonFly builds are now available as they are completed. It’s i386 right now, with x86_64 on the way.
Jan Lentfer posted about his progress on upgrading pf. He has pickups working, but on on a per-rule basis; he’s looking for feedback on how important this option is for other users.
Is it time to move to GPT instead of the traditional fdisk/disklabel combo? Petr thinks so. There’s some work to do, though.
Jan Lentfer has more on his progress updating pf in DragonFly to a more recent version. He’s looking for testers, especially ones with a more complex pf setup.