The kernel option PCI_MAP_FIXUP has been removed as of July 11th; if you’re upgrading past that point, make sure to remove that option.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org has a fresh set of pkgsrc-current binary packages for 2.2.1 located at http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages/DragonFly-2.2/pkgsrc-current/. I’ll start a pkgsrc-2009Q2 build momentarily – the pkgsrc-2009Q2 build will become ‘stable’.
The short summary: everyone passed. Yay!
5 weeks to finish!
The in-progress code for the Summer of Code project ‘DragonFly on AMD64’ has been imported; you can now build for SMP on AMD64, and complete a installworld/buildworld, natively. Modules don’t (yet) compile…
Virtual kernels are now SMP by default on DragonFly, even if you don’t have multiple processors/cores.
Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to version 1.0.0 and tcpdump to 4.0.0. (tcpdump site) I’d guarantee that having at least a passing familiarity with tcpdump will eventually, someday, solve an otherwise intractable problem for you.
Threading libraries libc_r and libthread_xu have been synchronized by Hasso Tepper; this shouldn’t cause noticeable issues. The potential issues he mentions for pkgsrc appear fixed, as I haven’t had any significant trouble (from that, at least) during bulk builds.
Alex Hornung is looking for suggestions on the userland tool(s) for his devfs project. This is a Google Summer of Code project, and I’m a bit late posting this, so hurry if you want to get your two cents in.
The binary pkgsrc packages I had on avalon.dragonflybsd.org for 2.3.1 are removed; I had mixed an old and new libc on the build system. (Sorry!) I’ll have new ones based on pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release very soon.
There’s going to be a lot of kernel structure changes this week, as Matthew Dillon works on making more system parts multiprocessor-safe. Rebuild everything including your kernel, if you’re running bleeding edge DragonFly.
EuroBSDCon 2009 is happening the 18th through 20th of September, in Cambridge, UK. There’s usually at least 2-3 DragonFly folks showing up at these – anyone planning to go?
Sascha Wildner has made it possible to include “other” compilers (meaning not GCC) in DragonFly’s build system. His post has additional details.
If you’re a student or mentor for Google Summer of Code, all midterm surveys have to be done by tomorrow, the 13th, at 12:00 PDT. Please do it if you haven’t – payment depends on participation.
The hammer command now has an ‘info’ option, which gives a great deal of information on your Hammer drives, thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez. (Committed)
Hasso Tepper has some things he’d like to see for the next release, and he put them together in a wish list. His hands are full with pkgsrc, but if any of these projects look interesting to you, now is a good time to take advantage of the delay before the next release. (there’s already some work done.)
This blog post talks about the identified reasons Ubuntu has been so successful in growth over the past few years. The post uses it as a comparison to Perl, but it holds some lessons for DragonFly. Some items we have now – a Live CD, simple install, regular release schedule – and they’ve been very useful.
On the other hand, the available applications is something that can improve – as nice as it it to build from source, immediate installation of binaries is best. Heck, some companies base their business around it. Pkgsrc is getting closer to creating an “app store” for DragonFly. We’ve got a civil community, but I’d like to figure out ways to make it even more accessible.
(Nobody mentions this when talking about Ubuntu’s success, but having a large, privately-funded company backing your open source project also helps.)
While on the subject, I would love to have a job like Jono Bacon’s. He works with all the issues that I think about.
Dennis Melentyev was trying out AHCI support, and as part of that process, Matthew Dillon described the steps needed to deal with disk renaming issues that can come from a NATA -> AHCI switch. This isn’t needed for most people right now, but I wanted to link to it just in case someone hits that moment of panic.
Matthew Dillon fixed a problem with AHCI on July 2nd. If you are running AHCI from before that date with a port multiplier, you may want to update. Further tests have completed without issues.
Alexander Polakov has put together an update of PCI bus and ACPI interrupt handling code taken mostly from FreeBSD, and ported it to DragonFly. Please try it out – if you previously had booting issues with DragonFly, this may have cured them.