There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
Joe Talbott wants to write DragonFly/BSD drivers for a whole slew of wireless devices. These are also all the adapters he doesn’t physically have. You can fix this by purchasing something off that page, which will ship right to him. A bwi(4) driver is next, for instance.
www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.
Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.
Aggelos Economopoulos posted more details on his event tracing library, accompanied by a rash of commits. He’s interested in feedback.
Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.
Dylan Reinhold has contributed a HOWTO document on setting up swapcache. Thanks, Dylan!
YONETANI Tomokazu pointed out something that could be useful in the future: when you start getting drive errors, before you throw it out, try lowering the speed. Maybe it’s a cable problem, if you’re lucky.
As described on the kernel@ mailing list, there’s several code bounties out now, formed in part from GSoC projects that didn’t get a slot. All of them have money waiting behind them. (I’d sure like to see better interrupt routing.)
As McLone points out, the filesystem comparison page on Wikipedia is missing some Hammer details. Anyone want to fill in the pertinent numbers?
I’m removing the links for the old (DragonFly 2.3 and older) pkg_radd paths on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. If you have one of those older systems, you can update one line in pkg_radd if it’s useful to you.
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on idle page zeroing; his work has been committed, and if enabled, should contribute to a teeny speedup. What’s it do? It gets memory ready for use when the CPU is not otherwise busy, so that less time is needed to allocate that memory. It looks like there’s more work on the way, too.
The version of pf in DragonFly is somewhat long in the tooth, but Jan Lentfer’s volunteered himself for the herculanean job of updating it. Go, Jan! Let’s hope this large task is more Nemean than Augean.
Marc G. Fournier posted some statistics gathered from his BSDStats service. It’s possible to activate this right now on DragonFly. Just put
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
in /etc/rc.conf. For details, there’s the man page.
If you have a Hammer filesystem, and you want to roll the entire thing back to a previous snapshot – all files, everywhere – it can be accomplished with one command.
Did you know… ipfw/natd appears to be broken in DragonFly 2.6? Using pf is a better choice, at least, but I found it out the hard way.
Videos of the presentations at AsiaBSDCon 2010 are up; FreeBSD – The Unknown Giant has a number of them. Constantine A. Murenin’s Quiet Computing presentation is interesting, especially because it runs on DragonFly.
I’ve put a few of the reports from pkgsrc builds on DragonFly out. They’re all using pkgsrc-2010Q1, on i386/DragonFly 2.6, i386/DragonFly 2.7, and x86_64/DragonFly 2.7. The links in the reports go to the errors that caused each package to not build. If you happen to see something that has an easy fix, or that you really need to have working, please submit a fix.