More Summer of Code summaries: Robert Luciani has posted what he plans for his MP contention profiling work, and Stathis Kamperis has a description of his C99/POSIX conformance audit testing, with links.
Hasso Tepper has added the open source HAL code for ath(4) (old man page), as suggested by Alexander Polakov. I’m not sure if this is related to Dmitry Komissaroff’s work.
Matthew Dillon has added a Makefile in /usr/src/test/vkernel that automates vkernel setup. You can create a virtual system in one step. ‘make help’ in that directory to see all the options.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s bwi(4) driver for DragonFly is going into FreeBSD 8, as mentioned in this Warner Losh blog post.
I’ve linked to explanations like this before, but it’s worth repeating: when Tim Darby had a crash, Matthew Dillon explained how to obtain a dump. This can be fantastically useful when debugging a crash.
Hasso Tepper pointed out an interesting problem: problems with unistd.h not being available on DragonFly keep a number of C++ programs from compiling. The fact that this doesn’t happen on other platforms appears to be completely accidental.
Alex Hornung posted a nice summary of his DevFS project for DragonFly Google’s Summer of Code – Matthew Dillon has a followup, too.
Are you a Summer of Code student for DragonFly? Don’t forget to post a summary of your project to kernel@ before the start. Yes, I know there’s exams.
Daniel Lorch, the student working on a port of Hammer to Linux, has a blog, with some notes on progress. I found this April item entertaining.
… And Antonio Huete Jimenez has described the few steps required to install it.
Pedro F. Giffuni suggested that the SEEK_HOLE and SEEK_DATA lseek extensions would be good additions to Hammer, and linked to a Sun paper that went into more detail.
If you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly, you’ll need to rebuild world and kernel after this recent change to interrupt counting from Sepherosa Ziehau.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has updated his pkg_dry installation script. You won’t need it much longer; it should show up in pkgsrc soon.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert tagged 2.3.1, which is still in the development branch, so don’t update unless you were already at 2.3. There’s a nice list of commits that went into this tag.
Naoya Sugioka has a Qemu patch to make a cloned tap(4) device work; feedback is desired, and Sepherosa Ziehau has already supplied some.
Aggelos Economopoulos added an interesting feature for virtual kernels: the memory of a given virtual kernel is now accessible directly at /proc/$pid/mem .
Yonetani Tomokazu discovered a permissions problem under Hammer, so Matthew Dillon made a number of commits to fix this and other issues. An update for 2.2 will get them for you, and DragonFly 2.2.2 will be put together very soon so that there’s a release image with these fixed.
Antonio Huete Jimenez wrote up his experiences using pkg_dry on DragonFly, which were mostly successful.
He followed up with a script that takes care of the initial setup for pkg_dry, and noted that following pkg_dry in CVS is the best idea at this point, as it’s going through rapid development.
It should be possible to point pkg_dry at pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org or one of the mirrors, and perform binary-only remote installs and upgrades of pkgsrc packages.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ability to use High Precision Event Timers (HPET) in DragonFly, based on FreeBSD code. It’s experimental, and he has instructions on how to find if your hardware supports it. It’s apparently a much faster timer than what is used with ACPI, though I do not have details on how that translates into real-world performance.
Johannes Hofmann has an initial version of the kqemu kernel module installable as a pkgsrc package, so that it can be managed the same as with other third-party software. I don’t know if this will actually make it into pkgsrc, but it would be nice if it did.
I had mentioned the new malloc in DragonFly before, but Matthew Dillon has a nice explanation of its performance improvements and the relationship to the existing slab allocator.