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
Bad: having the system used for mirroring DragonFly crash a lot.
Sascha Wildner’s added the cxm(4) driver, which supports Hauppauge PVR-250/350 video capture cards. Hasso Tepper kindly donated the hardware for testing.
I’ll note here that I have a Hauppauge TV card (848 chipset, I think) that’s possibly the oldest continuously functioning computer equipment I own; I’ve been using it for close to a decade without a single problem. I have nothing else that has reached the benchmark.
Student projects for Google Summer of Code will be announced this Monday, for DragonFly, and for all other participating organizations. DragonFly has 5 slots, and more than 5 excellent proposals, which is a good kind of problem to have. We’ll see what we can fit.
Sdävtaker came up with a potential idea for encrypting backup files, and Matthew Dillon followed up with another way that uses Hammer.
Daniel Lorch is working on a port of Hammer to Linux’s VFS, though since he’s using FUSE, it will be able to reach other systems, like NetBSD. The code is accessible.