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.
Matthew Dillon posted a warning about both Samuel Greear’s kqueue work and Alex Hornung’s LVM2 work. Both are now committed to DragonFly 2.7. These are dramatic (and useful!) changes, so some instability may happen for bleeding-edge users. His post does include some minor detail on what was touched.
Joe Talbott’s ported over iwn(4), which is the “driver for Intel 1000, 5100, 5150, and 6000 wifi chipsets.”
Undeadly has an article up about recent work on mandoc in a mini-hackathon. It’s mentioned in context with OpenBSD in the article, but mandoc is also present in DragonFly, and is a potential groff replacement. (And I think groff is the last item in base requiring C++? I may be wrong.) Plus, as I’ve said before, I like mandoc’s output. It would be nice to use that for our online man pages, for instance.
David Shao has updated his GSoC project page on the DragonFly website. His project is updating DRM/GEM/KMS for BSD systems. It’s a huge but important piece of work. This update brings news on updates to locking systems and data structures.
Samuel J. Greear’s work on his Google Summer of Code project, unifying the select/poll/kevent subsystem into kevent, is already available for testing. Any testing – just booting, or running X, or other simple tasks – is useful, as this new system touches many things.
Sascha Wildner has set up $CCVER so that it can be used with ‘clangsvn’. If you install clang from svn into /usr/local, it’ll get picked up and used as the system compiler.
Alex Hornung has imported LVM2 from NetBSD, along with cryptsetup and dm. (Not dm(8), but devicemapper) LVM(8) stands for Logical Volume Management, and it makes storage management much easier; you may have encountered it on NetBSD or Linux. Those additional tools make it possible to encrypt volumes. Alex has published details on how to use it.
Also: Alex’s not-really-related-but-I -mistakenly-linked-to-it udev/libdevattr work.
Using ‘serno’, meaning specifying disks by serial number rather than path, is a good idea. If you have a machine that started out as an older DragonFly installation, it may be a good idea to use this feature.