A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
OpenGrok is a source browser that I have not used extensively, but many people say is a great tool. The same people say it’s difficult to run. Zafer Aydogan just posted that DragonFly’s source is available now from his perfectly-functional OpenGrok installation.
(I’ll put it in the links sidebar here, too.)
NetBSD is using/will be using? ‘npf’, a new version of pf similarly-named-but completely-different firewall from pf. Hubert Feyrer put together a bunch of links talking about it. I link this because DragonFly is using a version of pf equivalent to what OpenBSD 4.8, and there’s been some discussion of what to do next; it appears FreeBSD and NetBSD are forking off separately from OpenBSD’s version.
Update: npf and pf share 2 letters in the name and nothing else, as Joerg told me – corrected.
Hey, look, DragonFly BSD showing in tweetspam! Don’t bother following the tweeted links; they don’t have anything useful. It’s entertaining to see the structure and coding of these bots; they’re no horse_ebooks, of course.
There’s an as-yet-undiagnosed problem with the @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists; you won’t see any mail from them right now. I don’t have an ETA for a fix because I don’t know the underlying cause yet…
Update: Fixed; I think – dragonflybsd.org DNS server was not responding, and it had a ripple effect.
I’ve put in an application for DragonFly to be a Google Summer of Code mentoring organization for the 6th year in a row – we have mentors lined up, so we’ll know by the Friday after next. See my post on kernel@ for pretty much what I just said.
Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD. I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point. Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old. The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.
Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use? I don’t know the answer.
It seems Sepherosa Ziehau won’t rest until he’s reached peak performance for every network card in DragonFly; he’s added multiple ring/MSI-X support for Broadcom 5709/5716 chipsets in DragonFly. In more concrete terms, this means better speeds when transmitting and receiving multiple streams of data.
(at least, I think so.)
I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD. FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors. It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.
As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.
Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:
I really wish the other BSD projects would include commit lines in the mail message subjects, so it was easier to catch things like these.
If you want to take advantage of the binary packages of DPorts, and have a x86_64 system with a recent DragonFly 3.3 on it: Francois Tigeot has you covered. There’s no i386 packages yet, which are the ones I could use right now, darnit.
If you want to try DPorts, see my earlier article.
The new vm.read_shortcut option has been turned on by default by Matthew Dillon, which should lead to some performance improvements. That improvement has been measured for tmpfs, at least. There’s also some buffer cache improvments that help on x86_64 systems, too.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out, tmpfs also no longer uses the mplock, so it’ll take better advantage of multiple processors.
Thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez, it’s now possible to set the MAC address for each interface and specify the disk serial number in the command line for a vkernel.
John Marino proposed a method for backing up world when upgrading, for those rare but catastrophic cases where the installed programs can’t run. After some discussion, he committed an automatic backup method, and there’s a ‘restoreworld’ target to take advantage of it.
The kernel already gets renamed to kernel.old as a backup, if I remember correctly.
If DragonFly is going to participate in Google Summer of Code for 2013, we need project ideas, and lots of them, at any size. There’s an existing project page that anyone can add to, especially if you’re a student and looking to add your ideas.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted more statistics on his ifnet/ifaddr per-CPU stats work. It’s doing so well that he’s very close to reaching the maximum physical capacity of the 4x gigabit ethernet hardware he’s using.
As Sepherosa Ziehau mentions in his latest commit, DragonFly now collects IFNET/IFADDR statistics on a per-CPU basis. This makes it more accurate, but may mess with any third-party program that accessed it directly. I don’t know if there’s anything in pkgsrc that does that…
I know OpenSSL in DragonFly was just updated, but Peter Avalos has done it again, bringing it to version 1.01e. I assume this new version is to fix some recently-exposed problems. He also has updated libdialog, which was previously not located in contrib/, as sime third-party software needed a more modern version. As a side effect from that, tzsetup in DragonFly now matches the version in FreeBSD and NetBSD. And, Sascha Wildner has updated the locale files on DragonFly, also to match FreeBSD and NetBSD.
If you’re near Germany, or like IPv6, the Schlund Technologies mirror for DragonFly is for you – it supports HTTP, FTP, and rsync.