We have several potential Summer of Code mentors already, but if you want to get in on the action, let me know. Org applications start Monday, and I’d like a count before then…
Michael Neumann has added his port of the e1000 driver from FreeBSD, though he doesn’t recommend using it yet. He’s looking for testers who have this hardware.
The ‘freeze’ for pkgsrc-2010Q1 is scheduled to start March 16th, which will be right around the same time of the DragonFly 2.6 release. The freeze lasts 2 weeks, usually, so new packages for 2.6 will be built probably about mid-April, based on this info…
clang, which many people look to as a gcc replacement, is now able to build itself. (Thanks John Marino for the heads-up, some time ago) It can also build world and kernel on DragonFly, going on the work of Sascha Wildner!
Using the pkgsrc package, put
clang_CC=/usr/pkg/bin/clang
in /etc/compilers.conf and then set $CCVER to “clang” when building:
env WORLD_CCVER=clang make -DNO_GCC44 buildworld
I haven’t tried this, so any errors in description are mine, not Sascha’s – can someone verify? I don’t have a test system to run it on right now.
Edit: see Sascha’s comment for the definitive method.
OpenSSL version 0.9.8m has been imported by Peter Avalos; this version contains a bugfix for a security issue.
(reproduced from my email to users@/kernel@)
The application period for Google Summer of Code 2010 starts in about a
week. We were able to enter in 2008 and 2009, so I’m optimistic that we
will get in for 2010 too.
Saying “I’m willing to mentor” doesn’t force you to commit yet; you don’t
have to work with a student on a project you don’t find interesting.
However, mentoring is a multi-week commitment to support a student who may
or may not have the best planning skills – please be ready to help.
I need to know soon how many potential mentors we have since we have to
ask for a given number of slots from Google as part of the application
process. If you are interested in mentoring, speak up here or by email, please. If
there’s a particular project on the GSoC 2010 page that looks interesting,
put your name by it.
There’s several projects in the works:
- Rui Paulo is working on an update of wireless device support in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon added libbsdxml to DragonFly as part of the prep work.
- Joe Talbott is working on unionfs; Nicolas Thery supplied some links, while Matthew Dillon wants deduplication.
For those wanting to try swapcache(8): Newegg has two deals running: a Corsair P128 128GB SATA II SSD for $355 and a Patriot PS-100 2.5″ 64GB SATA I/II SSD for $170. These are probably bigger than what’s needed for using swapcache, but if you’re itching to spend…
Welcome Samuel J. Greear as the newest DragonFly committer; he’s been around the project for a while, but recently became more active.
Michael Neumann has fixed the ability to stream Hammer data between 32 and 64 bit systems. However, this is a change to 64-bit systems that requires them to match; make sure that you are not mixing 64-bit systems built before and after this commit on the 21st.
I can’t find the commit message in the mail archive, so I’ll quote it here:
As part of a report on the status of swapcache and tmpfs, Matthew Dillon noted that a side effect of using a SSD for swapcache means that disk activity stays efficient, and the wear meter on the SSD is reduced much more slowly than for regular disk use.
Antonio Huete Jimenez notes that some programs have been enabled in the x86_64 build; if you’re running bleeding edge 2.5, please try them and see if they work in 64-bit.
Constantine A. Murenin has committed support for aps(4). This supports various sensors for disk and mouse activity, and even acceleration sensors.
Michael Neumann has ported igb(4) and em(4), and he needs people with the corresponding hardware to test it. Those are network cards, if you aren’t familiar with those short names.
The next release, 2.6, is scheduled for mid-March. Please make sure things are running well, as there’s a lot of new features already ready for this release.
This one’s a few days old, but I’m still trying to catch up with all the events lately: swapcache now has two flags to control whether just meta-data or all data is cached for any given set of directories; caching everything is only worthwhile if the swapcache device can keep up with the resulting traffic.
This requires a rebuild of world, if you’re running 2.5 bleeding edge.
Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs port is now ready to go. It’s still considered experimental, but it’s worth trying. tmpfs(5) is different because it keeps data in RAM once, and pages out only when needed. This best-case scenario is an improvement to mount_mfs(8) and md(4), its predecessors.
It’s running now on pkgbox64 and already seems to be speeding up the bulk build process.
The Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly is growing faster than I expected. If you have an idea (or, even better, want to take on a project assuming we make it into SoC), take a look.
It’s that Opera thing again. “Sigh“.