I could have sworn I noted it before, but as Venkatesh Srinivas points out, there’s a port of cpdup to Linux. Also, if you’re using cpdup to copy material out of a Hammer volume’s history, use the -VV switch.
DragonFly 3.2.2 has been tagged. The tag commit has a list of the fixes; this is a bugfix release, but it’s a good one. Download an ISO (they should be at the mirrors by now) or update your system.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot of commits to increase packet-per-second rates without increasing CPU usage. He’s published a sort of progress report/benchmark to show current performance levels. It sounds like he’s expecting even better performance in the future, though I’m not sure how much more he could push out of it, since the bulk performance appears to be close to the rated capacity of the copper…
There’s been a large number of fixes and improvements to DragonFly 3.2 lately, so I’m planning to roll DragonFly 3.2.2 this weekend so there’s an image with them all.
If you were thinking you wanted to try gcc 4.7 with pkgsrc, John Marino’s described the option you need to set. It only works in pkgsrc-master right now (because of changes John made), and not every package in pkgsrc will build.
The advantage is that it’s also possible, with the same syntax, to set pkgsrc to build with gcc 4.4. This means the default compiler in DragonFly can be changed to gcc 4.7 and pkgsrc packages that aren’t compatible can still be built.
Update: Check this minor change: ‘?=’ instead of ‘=’.
If you’re running DragonFly 3.3, make sure you perform a full buildworld and buildkernel when you next upgrade. Sascha Wildner is mentioning this as a cautionary note after experiencing issues when using quickkernel, after removing a number of syscalls. Once past that point, it should be safe to go back to quickworld/quickkernel.
Matthew Dillon has written up another update on his progress with HAMMER2. (I need to be consistent in how I write that.) He has disks being exported and mounted on other systems, and adds an explanation of some of the issues around creating reliable multi-master setups. Before you get too excited, no, multi-master isn’t working yet, and this is not production ready.
There’s more benchmarks for DragonFly vs. other systems on Phoronix. It has the same problem as previous benchmarks; some of the benchmarks may have no connection to reality (what does the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver” actually test?), and almost every system has a different version of the gcc compiler. So it’s meaningless in terms of comparative or absolute performance. On the other hand, DragonFly doesn’t do badly.
You can also look at the comments to see someone absolutely freak out over the very existence of things that aren’t Linux. I’m not sure if it’s actually trolling, since the comments are so exactly wrong.
Matthew Dillon turned off the machdep.pmap_mmu_optimize sysctl by default, since wider testing has found some bugs. It’s only on by default on DragonFly 3.3 systems, so there’s nothing to do if you’re on 3.2-release. The feature will come back after some bugfixing.
I knew about files like /etc/services, for common IP port usages, and /usr/share/zoneinfo, for time zones, but I didn’t know that DragonFly (along with other systems) keeps a list of agreed names for various human languages defined by ISO639 in /share/misc/iso639, and it’s maintained at least in part by the Library of Congress. At least I didn’t know until Sascha Wildner updated it.
Updated: Birthstones and flowers. Don’t know why.
If you’ve ever wondered how building all of pkgsrc would go with GCC 4.7.2, which is in DragonFly but not the default compiler, John Marino can show you just that. He has a list of the results from a bulk build of all packages on DragonFly with GCC 4.7.2.
This discussion of cryptographic hardware for FreeBSD may include hardware that would work for DragonFly too. Can someone verify?
Do you use ndis(4) for a network card that would otherwise not work? Are you running DragonFly 3.3? Are you willing to run USB4BSD and see if it works? If you do, tell Sascha Wildner if his changes worked.
If you are one of the few people still wanting to read an OS/2 HPFS drive, support for it in DragonFly has been updated by Antonio Huete Jimenez. It’s read-only, but writing didn’t work well, and I’d be surprised if there’s any hpfs disks that aren’t archival, out there.
Also, Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the pktgen program to generate even more packets, even at relatively low CPU clock speeds.
Sascha Wildner recently brought in support from FreeBSD for HighPoint’s RocketRAID 4520 and 4522 SAS/SATA RAID cards. It’s in the hptiop(4) driver.
The initial download of pkgsrc via Git on DragonFly is a little bit faster now, with the ‘make pkgsrc-create-shallow’ option recently added by John Marino. Note that there’s a similar option for src. It skips downloading file history.
Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD. Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on. For example:
smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006" smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. " smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "
This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.