A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
A conversation about compilers in the DragonFly base system led peeter (must) to describe his group’s use of OpenMPI on DragonFly for physics calculations. Apparently he’s had a significant performance improvement on DragonFly.
Along similar lines, John Marino helped out by bringing in libssp and libgomp for gcc 4.7 for use with OpenMP. (This is in DragonFly 3.3, not 3.2).
John Marino did a bulk build of pkgsrc using gcc 4.7.2, and posted the results. The result? About 1% of packages that built with gcc 4.4 did not build with 4.7.2. Whether that’s a problem with gcc or a problem with how each of those software packages were created by the original authors, I don’t know.
Sascha Wildner has committed Markus Pfeiffer’s port of USB4BSD to DragonFly. USB network, input , audio, and storage devices (including xhci/USB3 items) may work, though there’s no guarantee for each driver. This is added but not on by default, so see the first link for instructions on how to rebuild your kernel to use it. This will be in (but not default) the DragonFly 3.2 release.
(This is shaping up to be a much bigger release than I anticipated!)
Remember the new scheduler work? Well, it continued, and now Francois Tigeot has posted pgbench benchmarks of the progress and benchmarks of DragonFly vs. other operating systems. The links are to PDFs; scroll down as each have multiple pages.
The summary result: If you’re running Postgres, you probably want to do it on DragonFly. The numbers are the best results for any BSD, even better to some extent than Linux, which has had its own issues with schedulers and Postgres. DragonFly 3.2 will include these improvements.
I’m planning for DragonFly 3.2 to come with pkgsrc-2012Q3, the most recent release. I’m building binary packages to match, and the build should complete by the time we release on the 22nd…
Notice I said “should” – sometimes the universe conspires against bulk builds.
I branched 3.2 tonight. That means 2 weeks until release, so sharpen your bug-poking sticks!
(I’m very tired and unable to think of good analogies, sorry.)
Cause it could be added. The new algorithm could replace SHA-2, in use now in DragonFly. SHA-2 has not been ‘broken’ yet, so it’s not an emergency… yet.
I mentioned open-sourced CDE here before, but it makes me happy to see someone planning to do a bunch of work on it that will hopefully make it upstream, and specifically include DragonFly.
David Shao posted a nice writeup of what works and what does not for DragonFly as a desktop, from pkgsrc. It actually sounds pretty good other than issues with a recent cairo update that I think affected multiple platforms.
I recreated the by-month thread and date listing from the old mailing lists, but for Mailman. It’s at lists.dragonflybsd.org.
Debian squished with DragonFly, sorta like Debian/kFreeBSD? Don’t know if it will work, but what the heck.
As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd. That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too. It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages. 3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.
John Marino has accomplished the difficult task of putting gcc 4.7 into DragonFly. Version 4.4 is still the default, and the older 4.1 version has been disabled. If you want to try this newer version, setting WORLD_CCVER=gcc47 will build kernel and world that way too. If you’re curious about what’s different in this version of gcc, there’s a 4.7 changelog.
Are we the only BSD with this new a version in base? I think so.
P.S.: You’ll want to do a full buildworld if you’re running DragonFly 3.1
P.P.S.: you may need to put ‘NO_GCC47=true’ in make.conf, going from IRC comments.
P.P.P.S.: Nope, now it’s fine.
The machine that runs www.dragonflybsd.org and bugs.dragonflybsd.org is currently down. While it gets figured out, Alex Hornung has a static copy of the dragonflybsd.org main website available.
It’s been an extremely busy week for me, but I still have a batch of links here.
Your unrelated link of the week: Did you know one of the original ideas was to name DragonFly “TortoiseBSD” “TurtleBSD”? Probably not the best name.
Sascha Wildner’s added updatesfrom FreeBSD for the Areca arcmsr(4) driver; specifically for the ARC-1213, ARC-1223 and ARC-1882 models.
MARC, which stands for Mailing list ARChives, has a lot of mailing lists. It now includes the DragonFly users@ list, along with the others. (It’s not linked in *BSD on the main MARC page yet, but it should be soon.) It’s worth digging through the massive, massive wall of text on that page to find a mailing list you didn’t know existed.
Google Code-In 2012 has been announced. I’m not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year… anyone want to step up?
This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too. This only applies if you’re running DragonFly 3.1, of course.