There’s a deficit of vowels in the title of this post… Anyway, Alex Hornung has changed the format of some of the sysctls used in the I/O scheduler, dsched. Be ready for this if you’ve been messing with it in 2.7.
Siju George is making a Hammer volume’s snapshots available through Samba, with the results that some Windows-using developers get historical snapshots for free.
Aggelos Economopoulos has posted his patch for Page Attribute Table support; it needs to be able to perceive CPUs, which is apparently not that problematic. A potential task for others?
Linux Weekly News describes the 2.6 release of DragonFly in an extensive article, which even mentions this Digest. (yay!) Also in the comments, a link to a short interview with Matthew Dillon on a French site with an English translation.
Also, seen on the howling void: Software SSD Cache Implementation for Linux? asks for what we’ve already got: swapcache. Neener neener.
I posted a note about where the 2010Q1 builds are for pkgsrc; if you’re on i386/2.6 right now, you can try it out.
… is one of the better commit message descriptions I’ve heard.
The newest branch of pkgsrc for 2010 is officially out – read the release announcement for details on what’s updated. Among other things, DESTDIR support is almost complete, and a shift to default KDE4 is underway.
I’m working on bulk builds already, so hopefully soon you’ll be able to pkg_radd 2010Q1 packages…
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on new version of DragonFly’s malloc; he’s published an extensive writeup (which is inexplicably split in two in the mail archives) that includes several of my favorite thing: graphs! For those short on attention: the new malloc has around a 20-25% improvement over the existing malloc in MySQL sysbench results.
Matthew Dillon identified a possible data corruption bug in Hammer with a nearly-full filesystem. It’s dramatic enough he’s tagged 2.6.2 and 2.7.2 so that people can update; his message about it describes how to check for corruption.
And the torrent of new activity continues: Alexander Polakov has imported FreeBSD’s mptutil(8), good for managing LSI Fusion-MPT controllers.
In this recent note about the new wireless driver framework, Rui Paolo noted how to add a ath(4) device as wlan0 automatically.
DragonFly 2.7.1 has been tagged, mostly because of a problem with version numbers caused by the recent wireless driver merge.
Sascha Wildner has ported MultiMedia Card support from FreeBSD; SD, SDHC, and MMC cards should work in DragonFly now. Man, there’s been a lot of new additions recently.
Alex Hornung’s I/O scheduler is now in DragonFly; all reports I’ve seen from users say it makes interactivity much better. It’s not on by default; read his very detailed post and followup for details.
Thomas Nikolajsen wrote some tips on starting a NFS client on DragonFly; I’m linking to them both because they’re generally handy and specifically so I can have them for later…
Rui Paulo’s work porting the current set of FreeBSD network drivers over to DragonFly has been committed; there’s about a zillion commits (via Matthew Dillon) today to show for it.
If you’re worried that your Hammer disk may be going bad – and I mean bad like physically bad – you can check it with dd, or see what the hammer tool lists as bad.
Gergo Szakal mentioned some ideas he had about binary upgrades; among other parts of the conversation, Samuel J. Greear/Sascha Wildner reminded everyone that Matthias Schmidt had ported the FreeBSD binary upgrade system over in late 2007, and it’s still around to play with.
Rui Paulo’s work on wireless drivers will be entering 2.7 very soon. (2.6 is unaffected.) This will cause problems if you are running acx(4), bwi(4), iwi(4), iwl(4), rtw(4), rum(4), or ural(4), until someone writes a driver that matches the new framework. If you’re on 2.7 and you need these drivers working, hold off on updates for a bit…
Jan Lentfer’s posted the exact steps to migrate from BIND as part of the base system to BIND out of pkgsrc. The actual commit hasn’t happened yet.
This will only affect you when upgrading 2.7; DragonFly 2.6 still has BIND in it, and this won’t affect non-2.7 users until the next release.