Following this recent thread, it looks like the best answer for software RAID is: buy hardware. I’d be interested to hear what people have experience with in the realm of cheap but OK RAID hardware.
Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:
- Peter Avalos upgraded libarchive in DragonFly to 3.1.2, with a note of the changes. An ordinary and appreciated update.
- Sascha Wildner updated the ISO639 file to include the newest update: “Standard Moroccan Tamazight”. There’s no particular utility to that; I just like saying “Standard Moroccan Tamazight” out loud.
- Work on poudriere, the utility for bulk-building DPorts packages, has caused some nice speedups for DragonFly in extremely stressful situations. See one of Matthew Dillon’s recent commits.
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.
The machines at dragonflybsd.org are now on a different part of the Internet, so if you were having problems connecting over the past few days, it should be better now. Matthew Dillon wrote up details of what he changed and why he changed it, including a note about future blade server plans.
Added: Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.1d – see the changelog.
Removed: support for ISA sound cards, by Sascha Wildner. Goodbye sb16; I’ll remember you fondly.
It’s announced! If DragonFly is going to participate again for the sixth year in a row (wow!), we need mentor volunteers…
Matthew Dillon is moving dragonflybsd.org’s network link to a new VPN today. (It may have already happened; I only just read the email.) This may help the people that have reported their network path to dragonflybsd.org seems to die somewhere in the Cogent network…
The emx(4) driver now has support for multiple TX queues, but it’s not on by default. There’s scenarios where multiple queues work out with that hardware, but you have to be sure you are actually in the right setup for that first. Check Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message for the details.
Sepherosa Ziehau has merged the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for em(4) and igb(4), along with updating em(4)/emx(4) to version 7.3.4 and igb(4) to version 2.3.7.
John Marino has set gcc 4.7 as the default compiler in DragonFly. This replaces the previous default of gcc 4.4. The 4.4 version is still available, and while you can set NO_GCC44 to keep it from being built, John’s commit message notes that it’s still useful especially for some ports that don’t work with gcc 4.7.
If you have git installed, and you are trying to upgrade it, you may have problems. The scmgit-docs package dependency requires some DocBook files that aren’t always accessible. If you do run into this problem, there’s 3 separate options:
- You can just install scmgit-base and ignore scmgit-docs. The program ‘git’ still runs.
- You can download the prebuilt DocBook files separately.
- You can rebuild some XML-related dependent files and then rebuild without issue.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a detailed message showing the speeds he gets with multiple transmission queues, using igb(4). The short version:
Quick summary, the multiple TX queue support gives me: +200Kpps for 2 bidirectional normal IP forwarding (now 4.40Mpps) +160Kpps for 2 bidirectional fast IP forwarding (now 5.23Mpps)