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.
EHCI support is now always on, for 2.7 users, and will be for 2.8 when released. It’s possible to turn it off if it causes a problem, but it should generally just mean better USB performance.
Alex Hornung recently added mkinitrd(8), a tool for building a RAM disk early in the boot process. What’s it for? It’s needed to support more interesting bootable volumes, like LVM2, encrypted disks, or iscsi roots, all of which I’d like to see.
Samuel Greear has a whole page about his Google Summer of Code kqueue project, recently updated.
Sometimes, packages are renamed in pkgsrc, usually because of a version change. If that happens, it can be hard to find the replacement. You can manually add them, or there’s a trick to make the build ‘jump’ to the new name.
Siju George has written up his ‘real world’ experience with DragonFly in production; I should probably do the same since this site has been DragonFly-driven for years now. Add your story to the page.
Matthew Dillon followed up on some comments from Sepherosa Ziehau about power management to describe a possible new way to manage power consumption; the project is up for grabs.
Matthew Dillon has added powerd(8), a daemon that adjusts CPU frequency based on activity; his initial report describes a whopping 40% power savings for server use.
Matthew Dillon set up a git copy of the pkgsrc repository some time ago. However, it’s had syncing problems, and there’s an ‘official’ pkgsrc git repository now which does not have the problems. You can still pull from the same place, but it’s the ‘master’ branch now. His heads-up message describes how to switch.
Venkatesh Srinivas has quoted a good phrase to sum up the work he and Matthew Dillon are doing to remove the Big Lock: ‘Less Lock, More Rock’
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.