If you’re one of the few who has seen a ‘no local apic!’ error when booting, Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit may have a fix for that. He asks for testers, though he cautions to do it without APIC_IO in your kernel config.
Matthew Dillon is relentlessly adding to his AHCI work, with a new status report summing up the speed and stability improvements. The driver will probably end up in the next DragonFly release.
Matthew Dillon has initial support in for port multipliers, along with other AHCI work. It’s not ready for production yet, and he lists the various issues going on, including a need for a different way to mount disks – AHCI changes devicenames from ‘ad’ to ‘da’, which can be a hassle.
Update: hot-swap support, too.
Update update: parallel scans for speed.
The freeze for pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release starts this Sunday, the 14th. The 2009Q2 release should follow two weeks afterwards, which will be very close to the time of the next planned DragonFly release. (2.4, in case you weren’t counting.)
I’ve just finished a new build of the 2009Q1 packages for DragonFly 2.2, and it’s available on http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages – setting BINPKG_SITES or using pkg_chk can get you these latest versions.
I plan to have a 2009Q2 package set for DragonFly 2.4 as soon as possible after release.
Sascha Wildner has posted a patch that makes it very easy to switch out the compiler used to build DragonFly. This builds on earlier work from Alex Hornung.
This should make it into the base system. Everyone’s looking at compilers that aren’t gcc these days, it seems.
The pkg_radd(1) and pkg_search(1) utilities defaulted to pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org. They’ve been switched (by me) to point at avalon.dragonflybsd.org, which has much more bandwidth.
Matthew Dillon’s added AHCI as a kernel module, and has directions for testing. It’s not done, but he has basic hot-plug support in, among other things.
I’ve been posting a lot of “hey test this new technology” items, lately. That’s good. Since I haven’t done it already, here’s a description of AHCI.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for various power states on AMD Phenom and Turion-series processors. He has some specific notes that mention there’s more processor family support on the way. Good news for anyone with an AMD-based laptop.
Alex Hornung posted a summary of how his work on devfs is going, and Jordan Gordeev posted a summary of how much AMD64 is functional.
If you want to try either one (warning: many parts still broken!), use a vkernel for the devfs so a physical system doesn’t get broken. There’s build instructions for pulling together AMD64 DragonFly.
Update: manual instructions for AMD64, too.
Dru Lavigne’s excellent book ‘BSD Hacks’ is available at Scribd, and a chunk of it is readable through the preview at that site. A good chunk of what’s in there applies to DragonFly.
My copy is sitting on the shelf near by, inbetween ‘Perl Best Practices‘ and ‘The Mythical Man-Month‘.
The DragonFly mirror at dragonflybsd.kiev.ua went down due to hard drive failure some time ago, but it has returned. It’s an honest-to-goodness DragonFly system now too, I think. It’s (re)listed on the mirrors page.
As Hasso Tepper says, please don’t bring in any major changes until after DragonFly’s 2.4 release. This is mostly for the benefit of pkgsrc, so that we can have as complete a working set of packages as possible at release time. 2.4 will probably be in July.
While asking some questions, Alex Hornung let drop some of the details of his Summer of Code devfs project. Sounds like he’s making good progress.
Huawei modems, often available as USB attachments, have been problematic on DragonFly. However, it looks like it’s fixed. (I dont have one to test.) There’s a lot of names involved, so I’ll just point to the commit message.
When DragonFly was moving away from CVS, the votes were split pretty evenly between Git and Mercurial. DragonFly went to Git, but it’s apparently now possible to use Mercurial with a Git repository.
Statis Kamperis is working on POSIX conformance for DragonFly as his Summer of Code project; he’s posted some questions about the agreement he is given for the Open Group’s test suites. If you’re curious, he links to a copy of the agreement. (I have an I-am-not-a-lawyer-but-have-worked-on-a-number-of-contracts followup)
Matthew Dillon has put together some new test machines, in preparation for porting the OpenBSD AHCI driver to DragonFly. Check his message if you are thinking about building a new system, as they appear to work well.
Hasso Tepper has a “BIG FAT WARNING” about two new issues: threaded programs are broken on bleeding-edge DragonFly because of a possible GCC bug that was only recently exposed, and Xorg in pkgsrc has issues with the Intel driver.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert already has one change in that may fix the issue with threaded programs, and is working on the Intel driver issue.
Update: more threading changes.
Sdävtaker is giving a “Hammer administration” presentation at BSDDay, May 29th and 30th in Argentina. (His presentation is the second day.)
Jordan Gordeev posted installation instructions for his ‘BTX Halted’ fix. It may not be the final answer, though.