A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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“.
Matthew Dillon’s added support for IGD chipsets, found in various N450-based netbooks. It was tested on a Gateway LT2104u, for instance. I didn’t realize there still were Gateway computers.
If you need to talk about/sell the Google Summer of Code idea to people, Google now has a set of templates for GSOC presentations. Use them to drum up interest, or persuade someone to mentor/be a student.
It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!
For those of you wanting to try swapcache: Newegg is running a deal today: 30G OCZ SSD for $90. That’s after a mail-in rebate, though.
The installer now sets a /boot size of 768M by default; more space for kernels and modules, plus disks these days can take it.
Incidentally, if you’re compiling new versions of your kernel, it’s a good idea to copy your kernel file to kernel.good, and then use that to boot if the version you then compile doesn’t work. Someday, that will totally save you.
Guy Harris found a problem with non-blocking reads from a BPF device that’s common to DragonFly, FreeBSD, and Mac OS X. It’s fixed in DragonFly.
The disklabel64 program will permanently be ‘disklabel’ from now on, with the original disklabel sticking around as disklabel32. This is for a number of reasons, including 4k physical sector size in newer drives, which is still causing problems for other operating systems.