Do you have a SMP system, running DragonFly 2.5? Stathis Kamperis needs you to test something, to see if another set of system calls can be made multiprocessor-safe.
Update: An additional step.
If you’ve previously had problems in DragonFly with AHCI and a DVD drive, there’s a potential fix available.
The pkgsrc packages ghostscript6 and ghostscript-esp are probably going to be removed. Do `pkg_info | grep ghostscript` to see if this affects you.
Any readers involved with Python source? There’s two extant Python patches that Hasso Tepper put together for Python 2.5 and 2.4, languishing.
On a more positive note, an upstream fix for Perl was added promptly.
It’ll be sporadic.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has updated gcc 4.4 to version 4.4.2 (not used by default), and binutils to version 2.2.0.
dragonflybsd.org will be going down for work somewhere in the next two weeks. The package archive at avalon.dragonflybsd.org is located elsewhere, so pkg_radd and similar programs will still work.
Sascha Wildner has added mandoc(1), an OpenBSD product. I like the HTML output. (I’ve said it before, come to think of it.)
Alexander Polakov is putting together an update for the complex beast that is ACPI, but he has two questions that need an answer, about locking and APICs. Please help if you know something about it, as an up-to-date ACPI helps everyone.
Matthew Dillon went to the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Conference at Google’s offices in California, and took some pictures. It’s all available on Flickr. He was the only DragonFly attendee, but check to see what developers on other open-source projects look like in person. There’s even the not-related-to-me Joel Sherrill (on the left).
If you’re going to the CCC, there’s several DragonFly people going, and they are working to rent an apartment for the several days of the event. Follow up with Matthias if you’re going too.
With some recent reports of people running DragonFly on Eee 900 and Acer Aspire netbook models, here’s a link to a recent O’Reilly column that links to a whole bunch of different netbook vendors. If you have some spare cash and an urge for a netbook, try DragonFly on one and report back…
‘mike’ made this interesting csh script that allows autocompletion of Hammer sub-commands. e.g. type ‘hammer’ and then cycle through the available hammer commands as you would through file names.
Jan Lentfer repeated his Postgres tests on DragonFly with some system changes suggested by Matthew Dillon, and noticed a speed increase. (See previous report.)
If you’re running an AMD64 DragonFly system, there’s new pkgsrc binaries for you on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. (See report) The pkg_radd utility will pick them up automatically, or you can use pkgin.
Update: Well, be patient if what you need isn’t there yet. The packages are still uploading to avalon…
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added gdb 7 to the base system.
It’s possible to speed up a ‘make buildworld’ by increasing the number of parallel make processes, with the -j option. However, the optimal number of make processes depends on your system setup. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert did some testing, and it looks like the number of CPUs +1 is the best option – as long as you have more than 1 CPU. His writeup even includes a nice graph.
Johannes Hofmann has taken over estd, a “frequency scaling daemon for NetBSD and DragonFly”. The newest release brings multicore support on DragonFly.
This description of a Hammer bug makes for interesting reading, since it delves into the sequence of events where data is actually laid down on disk. Interesting reading for a geek, admittedly…