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.
The ISO images have been filtering out to the mirrors for a while already, but the 2.6.3 release is officially announced on the DragonFly website and release page.
Binary packages built for DragonFly 2.6 and 2.7 from the most recent pkgsrc quarterly release, 2010Q1, are now available. The utility pkg_radd will access them, or you can download directly.
As previously foreshadowed, BIND has been removed from the DragonFly base system. Instead, it’s installed from pkgsrc. Note that this includes tools like nslookup or host. Instructions after the jump.
From my email to users@:
- I almost have pkgsrc-2010Q1 builds done for every architecture, so I’ll point the default load location for pkg_radd to them within the next 24 hours.
- Are you still using a DragonFly system older than 2.4 and downloading binaries? If so, tell me.
- A project: enhancing pkg_search and pkg_radd to be able to tell when a package is missing because of license restrictions. Anyone want to try it?
DragonFly 2.6.3 is tagged and available, as previously planned. You can update to it normally, or go to a 2.6.3 ISO; available at various mirrors.
The May 2010 issue of BSD Magazine is out, with, among other articles, a writeup by yours truly about using HAMMER to access historical data.
A note, in part for my own benefit: the @reboot crontab entry is all you need to get a HAMMER mirror-stream going again after a reboot/shutdown.
Because of a number of problems, snapshot building hasn’t worked for some days. To fix this, some updates need to happen within DragonFly. This will mean a minor version bump to 2.6.3 in the next little while.
From a commenter on a previous post: Gentoo has a Google Summer of Code project porting portage to DragonFly, by student Naohiro Aota. I had no idea this was happening – this is interesting!
We’ve got 3 projects for Google Summer of Code 2010:
- “Device Mapper based Logical Volume Management”, by Alexander Hornung and mentored by Chuck Tuffli.
- “Porting kernel mode-setting, GEM and KMS, to DragonFlyBSD” by David Shao, mentored by Matthew Dillon
- “Coalesce + MPSAFE kevent, select, poll and wakeup” by Samuel Greear, mentored by Joe Talbott
We had a good number of excellent proposals, but only 3 slots from Google. There were only 12 spare slots by the end of the proposal period, too, meaning less than 1 spare per 10 organizations. I’d encourage people that applied and didn’t get in to still try the work; there were some neat proposals!
Visit the GSoC site for more details.
I’ve made reference to DESTDIR for pkgsrc several times, with only an informal understanding of what it means. From what I’ve learned, and what Joerg Sonnenberger’s told me, DESTDIR support means that packages can be built from pkgsrc without needing to be root. This means local packages can be built on an ordinary user account using pkgsrc.
This also means that pkgsrc can build packages before each upgrade, and only upgrade if a binary package can be built for each item involved. This means minimal downtime and no failures during upgrades, the biggest bugaboo for using pkgsrc that I’ve encountered.
Matthew Dillon went into detail on just how Hammer snapshots could be shared out via Samba.