Antonio Huete Jimenez has posted his results from testing Alex Hornung’s experimental I/O scheduler. Results are positive, and he also lists exactly how to download the code and test it on your own system. It’s worth trying, especially if you have DragonFly for a desktop.
Here’s some explicit instructions for upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6.
If for some reason you don’t have a /usr/src directory:
mkdir -p /usr/src cd /usr/src && git init git remote add origin git://git.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git git fetch origin git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
If you already have a /usr/src/ directory, you can just do the last 3 steps:
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
And then you can perform the normal “make buildworld…” steps outlined in /usr/src/UPDATING.
We’ve got 28 applications for Summer of Code, approximately what we had last year. If you’re a student, hold tight. We’ve got until the 21st to get everyone matched up, student <-> mentor.
David Shao is working on improving DragonFly’s DRM (kernel graphics drivers, not that other thing). That’s a good project to start, and also Antonio Huete Jimenez is willing to test it. We can always use more guinea pigs; if you want to contribute to DragonFly without writing code, testing someone’s dramatic changes is a big help.
Jan Lentfer’s ready to remove BIND from the base system; test out his changes if you’re running a DragonFly-based name server and want to see how it’ll work.
‘dylanr’ has built 2 interesting films using Gource to visualize DragonFly development; he’s mentioned them in comments here, but I want to make sure people see them.
Update: see the full multi-year film of DragonFly commits linked in the comments by dylanr; thanks for doing this!
Jan Lentfer’s done some new benchmarking of PostgreSQL on Hammer. There’s further suggestions and a more complete benchmark is planned, taking advantage of the Hammer improvements in 2.6. In the meantime, you can look at previous benchmarks.
If you’re a potential Summer of Code student, there’s about 72 hours left in the student application period. Get it in there!
DragonFly 2.6 is out! Download from a mirror, check the release page, and enjoy the large number of new features. There’s a full set of binary packages built, too.
Technically, this is 2.6.1, since 2.6.0 was tagged a week ago and 2.6.1 has all the last minute fixes since then.
Gource is a tool for visualizations from version control history; the video page has some examples. (via) I’d love to see this run on DragonFly. I’m curious to see what would happen on a huge, old repo, like NetBSD. Please hlep me, intarwebs!
2.6 will probably be out within the next 24 hours. We’re just waiting on the packages, though we’re probably in the clear already.
Be ready for mild confusion with this and the current Linux kernel. I know it’ll happen.
Daniel Lorch has ported Hammer to Mac OS X, of all things. It’s not complete, but he’s moving right along.
Daniel Lorch’s work on porting Hammer to Linux (read-only, currently) has been moved to a new location.
Alex Hornung posted a followup about his I/O scheduler work, with some interesting ways to watch the state of your disk’s activity.
Alex Hornung has posted an elaborate summary of his I/O scheduler work, with details on usage. He reports speed improvements under heavy load. If this sounds interesting to you (and it should), it’s possible to test his changes right now.
OpenSSL (which recently hit 1.0, though that’s not in DragonFly yet) has been patched to cover a recent security issue, thanks to Peter Avalos.
Jan Lentfer’s updated BIND to 9.5.2-P3, too.
Venkatesh Srinivas’s new sysctl, “debug.panic” is available for those who want to panic their machine on purpose, but don’t have direct access to the keyboard.
A problem found by Jan Lentfer and fixed by Matthew Dillon means that you can get a good performance boost if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly from the last month or so. Or, you can just wait a week for the 2.6 release.
Alex Hornung has been working on an I/O scheduler; he’s made some graphs to show results so far. They’re plain, but pictures are always fun.
DragonFly 2.6 has been branched, and should be released next week. Check the tag message for a list of the many, many commits.