Thanks to the effort of a number of people, DragonFly (-current) now supports KMS and accelerated video on Intel 915 chipsets. It’s 2D and x86_64 only for now, but it’s much, much better than just using the vesa driver.
Please welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Johannes Hofmann. He earned this by coming up with a significant chunk of DragonFly’s upcoming KMS/915 support, and it’s now easier to just have him work directly than to be constantly committing for him.
It’s week 6, I think, and the midterms are coming up. Here’s the status reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Michael W. Lucas wrote a blog post about pkgng and Ansible on FreeBSD. Will it work on DragonFly? We already have pkgng on DragonFly in the form of dports, and Ansible… might work? Please, someone try.
In part of a long thread about dports packages on the users@ list, Matthew Dillon notes that a new set of packages for i386 and x86_64, for 3.4 and for “3.6” (meaning bleeding-edge DragonFly, even though that’s numbered 3.5) is mostly uploaded. He also notes that a Haswell-processor-based blade server for DragonFly is in the works, so much of the dragonflybsd.org infrastructure is going to move from his house to a datacenter, with the benefits that provides. It’ll also help automate binary package building.
Sepherosa Ziehau added SO_REUSEPORT to DragonFly. I don’t know how the mechanism works, because he didn’t include a description, but he did include a explanation of just how much it reduces CPU usage during as-high-as-physically-possible network load. He even wrote tools to test it more heavily.
I’m late for this, even though the students weren’t. Mea culpa! There’s been a lot of discussion on IRC, in EFNet #dragonflybsd, between the students and various DragonFly developers.
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Thanks to the efforts of a large number of people, KMS support is showing up in DragonFly. This supports accelerated video on the new Intel graphics chipsets that seem to show up on many recent laptops.
Do you have a Emulex OneConnect 10Gb NIC? Well good news! Sascha Wildner brought in updated the oce(4) driver from FreeBSD to support Skyhawk models in DragonFly.
(My bad; looked at the wrong oce(4) commit originally and re-reported the import instead of the update.)
We’ve never had a group of student post progress this regularly. It’s great!
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
Something new and odd: A port of the Hammer (1) filesystem into Go, for go-fuse. As the author has said, it’s more for the practice of learning Go and Hammer than for producing anything useful. Still, an interesting way to learn.
Apparently Sepherosa Ziehau has been improving DragonFly’s route table performance under extremely heavy load. (e.g. run efficiently; don’t die) I don’t have a definitive commit message to point at, but looking at his recent commits are a good start.
Encryption seems to be the accidental theme tonight. A question about Hammer 2 and encryption prompted this list of possible solutions from Matthew Dillon. Hammer 2 is still months out, so these features both require time and someone interesting in doing them – though they sound quite possible.
Still not sure if I should be writing Hammer or HAMMER.
If you were wanting to encrypt your /home directory, Pierre Abbat has written up the explicit steps he took to do that very thing.
Week 3 is underway, and the students are starting to get into the meat of their projects:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
The pkgsrc-2013Q2 branch has been out for some days, but the official release announcement has now been published, with details on the number of ports. You should be able to pull it down from dragonflybsd.org via git, by the way.
The official announcement has gone out. You should be able to pull pkgsrc-2013Q2 via git from dragonflybsd.org within the next 24 hours.
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their second week reports:
- Daniel Flores: HAMMER2 compression feature
- Larisa Grigore: System V IPC in userspace
- Pawel Dziepak: Make vkernels checkpointable
- Joris GIOVANNANGELI: Capsicum
- Mihai Carabas: hardware nested page table support for vkernels
There’s a lot of progress for the second week, which is wonderful!
If you have an Emulex BladeEngine 2 or 3, or an Emulex Lancer, it should work in DragonFly, thanks to Sascha Wildner’s recent commit. Emulex has 10Gb network cards, in case you were like me and not familiar with the name.
(You thought I was going to type “Sepherosa Ziehau”, didn’t you?)
FreeBSD ports, and therefore Dragonfly dports, will drop KDE 3.5 items sometime very soon. It’s possible to continue to build them in dports, but it’s extra work. If you need them, volunteer, because otherwise they will be dropped. (An idea I fully support.)