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.
Colin Adams has a DragonFly system up and running, and he’s posting about dragonflies – the insect variety.
Hasso Tepper, who has been working very hard on pkgsrc on DragonFly, has a few strange pkgsrc issues he’d like help on. Anyone have ideas? (Follow the thread to see what’s been done so far.)
The 2.2.1 release is on its way out to mirrors now. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has kindly put together a list of the changes in this new version.
Naoya Sugioka has the latest version of his kqemu patch; it fixes some issues noted by Johannes Hofman. It may end up in the base system.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added ‘ifpoll’, a feature similar to polling(4). It has to be enabled via a kernel option and so far is only enabled for emx(4); read his commit message for more details.
Hasso Tepper spotted a tty problem that caused a panic in kdesu; Matthew Dillon committed a fix which means the release is delayed until tomorrow. (Thanks, Lazarus, for catching it first)
Make Hasso Tepper’s life a bit easier and take heed of this list: Maintaining stuff in pkgsrc.
Edit: Meant to publish this a bit ago; missed it. Sorry!
The 2.2.1 release of DragonFly, rounding up changes since the release (I don’t have a list), should be tomorrow.
Mashing together to make one post:
FreeBSD-SA-09:05.telnet and FreeBSD-SA-09:07.libc have been fixed in DragonFly.
These PC-BSD 7.1 vs. Kubuntu 9.04 Benchmarks are interesting but not that conclusive – different versions of gcc were used. (thanks J. Kanowitz) Here’s a different comparison of performance inside a VM from Ivan Voras.
Naoya Sugioka has kqemu working with the intended performance improvements; please test if you use qemu. (Johannes Hofmann has done some initial tests.)
Hasso Tepper has lang/gcc3 working in DragonFly 2.3, which means that we could potentially drop the version of gcc3 in contrib/ after the 2.4 release. He asks for other testers, please.
This would have the nice side effect of speeding up buildworld tremendously, as gcc3 and gcc4 get rebuilt each time.
Spotted by trevorjk in EFNet #dragonflybsd: Mono from pkgsrc now compiles on DragonFly.
- Thanks to Stathis Kamperis, it is now possible to build DragonFly 2.2 on a DragonFly 2.3 system, if for some reason you need to move to a system from before the recent libc changes.
- Matthew Dillon has replaced the existing BSD malloc with a port of the slab allocator, which makes malloc() faster, with minor benefits for a buildworld.
- Matthew Dillon also has a patch for people wanting to look for the elusive ‘file-missing-in-directory-listing’ Hammer bug. Caveat Emptor.
Murray Stokely very kindly passed me a link to his summary of the 8 videos now online showing presentations from the recent 2009 DCBSDCon.
Of particular interest is Robert Luciani’s talk about M:N threading in DragonFly. Yes, that’s the same Robert Luciani who is participating in Summer of Code with DragonFly to profile kernel contention on multiprocessor systems.
There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.
Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott
Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon
Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear
Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon
Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper