Alex Hornung has done some preliminary work with llvm/clang, and has successfully compiled a GENERIC DragonFly kernel, and completed a buildworld, using it. He also has some very nice notes available detailing the work. There’s potential for cross-BSD work with FreeBSD on this one, too.
growisofs tips
If you’re using growisofs (or K3b) to burn your DVDs and having some trouble, here’s some tips that may get it working.
New Hammer feature
Matthew Dillon has added a “rebalance” feature to Hammer, which cleans up the underlying B-Tree structures in Hammer that might otherwise slow down searching. It’s considered experimental, so be careful with it for now.
Details on vkernel
While these details have probably been explained before, Matthew Dillon has a nice summary of how the vkernel system works, for your weekend reading.
Some pkgsrc oddities
If you feel ambitious, Hasso Tepper has a few pkgsrc items that don’t build on DragonFly, and he hasn’t found out why yet. Anyone with experience and/or ideas about these packages is welcome to make suggestions.
Another project: signals
Someone want to fix up siginfo?
Qemu Howto
For those wanting to build Qemu right now on DragonFly, Hasso Tepper has published instructions on how to compile from Qemu’s development trunk.
Messylaneous, 03/12/2009
A bunch of links, cause that’s the easiest way to get this all out:
- ‘Beket’ has added a vkernel debugging howto on the DragonFly site.
- The Open64 compiler may work may work with some tweaking on DragonFly.
- And llvm/clang too.
- You can use BSD almost any way you want. Linux, not so much. (via)
- Hammer softlinks can now be represented in a shorter form.
IRC option
This hasn’t been as clearly noted as it could be: there’s a DragonFly channel on IRC: #dragonflybsd on EFNet, with a steady population of users and developers. Please drop in.
SoC 2009 application is in
I just finished the application for DragonFly to participate in Summer of Code 2009:
http://socghop.appspot.com/org_app/show/google/gsoc2009/dragonflybsd
We did well last year, so I’m hoping we will get in again. Check the website for this year’s details.
Less BGL in the network
Big news: Sepherosa Ziehau has managed to remove the Big Giant Lock from the ip and bridge forwarding path. This includes ipfw, though not yet pf. It is in fact possible to make the whole TCP/UDP code path BGL-free. Sepeherosa helpfully posted some benchmarks to show just how significant the improvements can be.
Recent website changes
- ‘alexh’ put in a new page on dragonflybsd.org, describing how you can contribute to DragonFly.
- ‘jth’ has been making a huge number of fixes for the Handbook pages, for links I missed in conversion.
- If you have projects for Google Summer of Code 2009, or can work as a student or mentor, put it on the SoC 2009 page, as a number of people have been doing.
A new, graphical bootloader
Oliver Fromme has a new bootloader for FreeBSD and DragonFly. He’s added the DragonFly logo, and it looks neat. Can someone test this on physical hardware?
Old wiki is now read-only
wiki.dragonflybsd.org has been set to be read-only, since the content has been moved to www.dragonflybsd.org. The site hasn’t been turned off yet, because I may have missed something in the move…
Port of tmpfs underway
Have you patched Qemu lately?
With the new 0.10.0 release of Qemu, it’s a bit easier to get it running on DragonFly. Hasso Tepper asks that anyone who patched Qemu to run it on a DragonFly system send him the patches. He can get them into pkgsrc, and upstream.
Another man page
Stathis Kamperis has written up a man page for objcache. Stathis is looking for feedback, though Sascha Wildner and Samuel J. Greear have already commented. More is welcome before it goes in.
(I’m especially happy about the concept of complete man pages, having been frustrated today by a newly installed Linux system that lacked man pages to match the installed drivers or utilities for the intended hardware. Yeah, I’m talking AsteriskNOW.)
Extra logo versions
If you were looking to create a very large or very small version of the DragonFly logo, I’ve added .eps and .ai versions of the logo to the images page on the DragonFly website.
iwi(4) update
The iwi(4) firmware has been updated, and there’s an announcement that tells you where to find it.
Note SoC interest now!
If you are interested in the Google Summer of Code project, as a student, a mentor, or just want to suggest a project, write that down:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/gsoc2009/
The application period starts for DragonFly (for the organization, not students) in a week, and it’ll help to see who wants to get in on the action.