If you have any remaining issues for DragonFly that you want fixed before the 2.4 release in September, link them to the ‘umbrella issue‘ in the bug tracker. It makes them easier to find.
size_t reverted
As predicted, size_t and ssize_t is back to normal. (Hasso already noted this in a reply to the original post.)
Hammer speedups
Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to Hammer that make performance during mixed operations (reading and writing requests at the same time) much faster. This should work for everyone, though AHCI/SILI/SCSI users will notice it more. The new writing system is called ‘BIOQ‘.
Website changes
www.dragonflybsd.org is now running a newer version of ikiwiki because of me; tell me if you see problems, as they’re probably my fault. Oh, and I cleaned up the developer docs page too.
Hammer improvements, tests
Matthew Dillon’s made some improvements to Hammer’s read and write processes. To quantize this, he’s tested Hammer and UFS with blogbench and written up the results. The tl;dr summary: UFS performs well until the system cache runs out, and then it halts. Hammer has some overhead from saving all history, but doesn’t stop working under a much heavier load.
size_t and ssize_t are different sizes, for now
DragonFly’s size_t and ssize_t have been modified. This creates more exact warnings of 64-bit problems when building on 32-bit systems. It may cause trouble with pkgsrc, though, so it will be reverted before the release (on 32-bit) if needed.
Be careful if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly. A full buildworld is needed because of this.
More bullets
I’ve got a number of little items, so more roundup:
- How much disruption happened in DragonFly after introducing a dynamic device system? Surprisingly, very little, as most of pkgsrc still builds. Thanks are due to Hasso Tepper for the corrective work.
- _why makes some very perceptive comments.
- Jordan Gordeev’s been working on the very difficult AMD64 port as part of his Summer of Code work. He says thanks for the help, and others reply in kind. Speaking of which, it’s possible to boot 64-bit DragonFly now, though it’s not production-ready.
Updating basic pkgsrc packages
I’ve always had trouble updating certain pkgsrc packages that happen to also form the basic tools for pkgsrc – pkg_install, bootstrap, etc. Hasso Tepper has very kindly written up a note describing how to update these packages with newer versions of pkgsrc.
MPT updated
The mpt(4) driver has been updated, thanks to Alexander Polakov. This is useful for anyone using LSI Logic hardware for fibre channel disks, for instance.
Vinum and devfs play together nicely
Vinum’s been changed to work with devfs, with the advantage that drive labels instead of device paths can now be used. There’s some caveats – read the message for details.
Help for cdparanoia
audio/cdparanoia, in pkgsrc, had a major update and now doesn’t work on DragonFly. Hasso Tepper could use a hand fixing it – any takers?
Messylaneous: books, lawsuits, git, more
Dear universe, including DragonFly people: stop doing so much stuff. It’s hard to keep up.
- Git in One Hour, an O’Reilly webcast. You need to register (free) and so on, but what the heck. O’Reilly doesn’t show crap.
- Poul Henning-Kamp is suing to recover the cost of Vista on his Lenovo laptop. (He’s installing FreeBSD.) I hope it comes out in his favor, though it will have little legal effect here in the U.S. (via)
- I didn’t realize this until I chimed in on the mailing lists, but one of the best books about file systems is freely available as a PDF.
- Another benefit of Hammer: you can’t run out of inodes, nor is it possible to have too many hardlinks.
- Some notes on pf usage in DragonFly. I know some parts have been mentioned before, but it’s good to sum up.
Much more swap space available
The amount of swap space usable under DragonFly has gone to a theoretical max of 4 terabytes. The practical limit is probably around 512 gigabytes. As Matthew Dillon writes, this could be interesting when paired with SSDs.
GCC 4.4. and NO_GCC44
As Hasso Tepper pointed out, having GCC 4.4 in DragonFly is unique to DragonFly. Systems like pkgsrc don’t work due to the changes in headers and etc. between gcc 4.2 and 4.4, and since no other BSD uses gcc 4.4, the fixes would all have to come from DragonFly (and be backward compatible). This is unlikely to change in the near term, since this newer version of gcc is being refused due to the V3 GNU Public License, not a technical issue. It’ll stay in DragonFly for now.
However, you can specifically exclude it and speed up buildworlds with the new NO_GCC44 option. It’s also possible to use NO_GCC34 in make.conf to keep the old version of gcc from building, for those who don’t like to wait.
Welcome new commiter: Alex Hornung
I totally missed this, but Sascha Wildner reminded me: Alex Hornung now has commit access to DragonFly, due to all the devfs work he’s done.
DevFS cleanup, iSCSI start
Matthew Dillon provided a summary of the state of the dynamic device filesystem work, plus a note about the preliminary iSCSI work. He also brings up the notion that iSCSI would eventally allow booting off a drive no matter where it’s physically connected.
Minor format change in mailing lists
Any commits to DragonFly go to the commits@dragonflybsd.org mailing list. The subject format has been reduced to “git: “, branchname, and the first line of the commit message. Keep that in mind when constructing your commit messages, and if you have any filters based on subject line for your mail.
pkg_radd improvments
If you’re on DragonFly 2.3.1 or 2.3.2: I’ve uploaded a full pkgsrc build to avalon.dragonflybsd.org based on pkgsrc-2009Q2. It’s possible to use pkg_radd to automatically download and install packages for those systems. (and pkg_search will search the remote repository for you.)
If you’re on DragonFly 2.2.x, I’ve modified the pkg_radd target for that release so that when pkg_radd makes a request, it is redirected to the appropriate place on avalon.dragonflybsd.org instead of attempting (and potentially failing) to find a matching mirror.
I said close to the same thing as the above text on users@; the short form of all this is that pkg_radd should generally work for everyone. Tell me if that’s not your experience.
Serial number details
There’s some more explanations of how disk serial number support is working from Matthew Dillon, plus a warning that a full kernel/world rebuild is needed because of these changes.
If I’m reading it right, serial number support, combined with a dynamic /dev, makes it possible to identify a disk by serial number, assign a name to it, and then refer to that disk directly by name in places like /etc/fstab. Much, much easier than remembering /dev/ad0c or /dev/ad1a, and so on.
DevFS and vinum do not get along
DevFS breaks vinum. Will it be fixed? Yes, hopefully very soon.