The 2.4 release will be later this month; Matthew Dillon has details. He appears to have already fixed the Hammer bug he mentions as a final issue before release.
Oh, look – Alex Hornung made Linux emulation work again. Thanks!
There’s some new HP server hardware out there, and Hasso Tepper found some problems (and lists some potential solutions) with installing DragonFly, mostly centered around keyboard handling. It sounds like NetBSD’s keyboard mux may solve it for us, if someone’s willing to add it…
Alex Hornung has posted a summary of what Unix98 pty devices are, and how they are supported under DevFS. If something screwy happens, there’s even a debug option to turn on.
Say hello to the newest DragonFly committer: Alexander Polakov. Hello, Alex!
If you want to use kerberos for logins, you need pam_krb5.so. However, that’s not built automatically since kerberos was removed from the base system in DragonFly. The solution is to install security/heimdal from pkgsrc and follow corecode’s brief instructions.
Want to make Hasso Tepper’s day? He’s posted 4 separate bugs for DragonFly that revolve around pkgsrc packages: sysutils/hal, sysutils/libgtop, audio/pulseaudio, and HTML5 video in FireFox. All of these (except the last) are issues that have been present for a while, and fixing any of them will help a number of other pkgsrc packages work correctly on DragonFly. If the work appeals to you, please dig in.
Qemu, used for testing 64-bit DragonFly, has been updated to version 10.6 in pkgsrc. BSD user emulation compiles, but doesn’t run, as Hasso Tepper has found out. He’d appreciate it if someone could investigate… (his hands are full with the rest of pkgsrc.)
Hasso Tepper has written up a mini-FAQ for pkgsrc and DragonFly. Among other points, he asks that people try to politely submit DragonFly-specific changes upstream, past pkgsrc, to the software creators themselves. This creates the least amount of work for pkgsrc developers and DragonFly users.
The libtiff package has been found to write out incorrect TIFF files in version 3.9.0. If that’s what is installed on your system, please update now.
DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent, has been updated so that it can deliver email from cron job output. DMA is a former Summer of Code project to make a local-only mailer for DragonFly systems, so that larger mail transfer agents (like Sendmail or Postfix) are not needed on a system that isn’t designed to receive mail from external sources. There’s a TODO list (click the gitweb link) if you’d like to contribute.
Siju George asked about updating pkgsrc packages, both on DragonFly mailing lists and on pkgsrc-users@. The ensuing discussion can be boiled down to several alternatives: pkg_chk in a separate chroot, pkg_rolling-replace, or pkgin, pointed at avalon.dragonflybsd.org. I’ve used pkg_rolling-replace several times with good results, and it may be possible to convince it to use binary packages, too.
This article about how to not treat project contributors reminds me: have you contributed to DragonFly? (and I don’t mean as a committer) Make sure your name is on the Team page.
The 2.4 release will attach disk drives by serial number. Matthew Dillon’s written up a quick HOWTO that describes how to use it. The interesting effect, as he notes, is that a drive can be attached in almost any way – a firewire enclosure, directly to the motherboard, through a card, etc. – and the machine will still happily boot without any changes needed.
For those of you running DragonFly 2.3.1 or later, I’ve updated the pkgsrc-2009Q2 packages on avalon.dragonflybsd.org to the latest versions on that branch. If you’re curious to see which were updated, I have a list after the cut:
It’s now possible to set up rules for your dynamic device file system. If this intrigues you, and it should, there’s more details about the rules within the devfsctl(8) man page.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has removed GCC 3.4 and Kerberos 5/Heimdal from the base system. Kerberos hasn’t been building as part of base for a while, and is available in pkgsrc. It was also the last item that requires GCC 3.4, so buildworlds are little quicker now. (Cross your fingers that GCC 4.2 the current version doesn’t break somehow.)
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.
As predicted, size_t and ssize_t is back to normal. (Hasso already noted this in a reply to the original post.)
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‘.