Matthew Dillon’s put more of his Hammer work into DragonFly, with notable parts being the creation of a ‘dmsg’ setup for advertising available block devices to share between machines using Hammer. To anticipate your next question: No, it’s not something you can run right now as a test; this is the underlying framework.
The kernel in DragonFly is now SMP by default. The “SMP” option in the kernel config is no longer needed, so it’s been turned into a no-op. You don’t have to update your custom kernel config… yet.
The pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 3.2 are still building… I’ve tagged the release, so it will be ready as soon as the packages are ready.
Sandip Jadhav asked if anyone was working on an I/O scheduler. Chris Turner replied with a “no”, but also with a list of places to look for details on writing one, which I’m linking here for posterity.
John Marino is working on a very good idea: bringing bmake into DragonFly as a replacement for the current ‘make’. bmake is going through more active development and apparently also in use/will be used? on FreeBSD, so syncing up with the same make flavor as FreeBSD and NetBSD will help everyone. It’ll also remove the problem where you ‘make’ everything in DragonFly, except pkgsrc packages which you ‘bmake’. It’s not changed over yet.
(What does OpenBSD use for make?)
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.