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.)
Earlier this week, Daniel Flores posted the first-week report on his Google Summer of Code project, file compression in Hammer. He mentioned that the LZ4 algorithm he is using seems to have the best performance with repeating text data, as in logfiles. I asked for numbers, and he provided them. The important data in the results is the total compression column. It shows how many 64k blocks were able to be compressed, with that type of data.
If you have a mps(4) device (LSI Fusion-MPT 2 SAS disk controller), you may be interested in Matthew Dillon’s large commit of bugfixes from FreeBSD. Specifically, he notes that the drive gets ‘overtagged’, and performance can be greatly improved by reducing the number of tags used.
Thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau, Netperf will now calculate Jain’s fairness index. That is a formula that is both interesting and unfamiliar to me. Not that I understand it, of course – it’s just because it has a neat name.
It looks like OpenJDK7 works in pkgsrc for DragonFly, thanks to Ryo ONODERA, and I think it’s working in dports too.
Because Sepherosa Ziehau changed mbstat, anyone on bleeding-edge DragonFly will need to rebuild world, or else netstat will become confused.
All the Summer of Code students for DragonFly have posted their first 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
If any of these projects are interesting to you, or if you have any tips for these students on work they are doing, please provide feedback.
There’s already been some previous conversation about how much longer to support the i386 platform for DragonFly. It looks like PC-BSD will be the first ‘flavor’ of BSD to make the jump. Support for PC-BSD on i386 will be dropped after release 9.2. That includes ‘TrueOS‘, the version of PC-BSD for servers, which I did not know about until just now.