Francois Tigeot benchmarked several different operating systems using Postgres 9.2b3, including DragonFly, and published the results. I have a local copy of the PDF since the attachment didn’t really survive the archiving. Follow the thread for discussion. The Linux results look abnormally high, so it is possible that something different is happening on that platform…
Do you happen to have the saved messages for one or more @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists sitting around? Hopefully in mbox format? I’m working on getting Mailman installed to replace bestserv, and being able to bring in the old messages would be nice.
I’m working on building new images, but: DragonFly 3.0.3 has been tagged. If you’re running 3.0, you can update and get some of the recent bug fixes.
I noticed that this recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau is a bug fix for jme(4). The commit thanks a JMicron employee for help. It’s always appreciated when a vendor is helpful to an open-source project for hardware support. It’s also something you should consider the next time you are shopping for computer parts.
Antonio Huete has updated dhclient(8) to match the OpenBSD version from whence it comes. I think all (most?) the BSDs use the OpenBSD dhcp client as a base now. The only user-facing change I see in a quick reading of the changes is a new ‘egress’ command line option.
John Marino has been on a tear fixing pkgsrc packages, and he posted a list of what he considers the most necessary packages to get working on DragonFly. Several people have already stepped up and fixed them if you follow the thread. If one of these packages is something you use, it’s worth looking at.
John Marino is working on updating tcl in pkgsrc. It’s apparently quite messy to update, which may be why it has sat out of date for some time. Never one to rest, he’s also been making FUSE filesystems work on DragonFly. (Here’s a FUSE explanation, if you need it.)
Also this. Someday I’m going to write a “games on DragonFly” feature, or series.
If you wanted to try Hammer 2 and you have several DragonFly-current systems around (virtual or not), Matthew Dillon has the instructions. Keep in mind that this is not something ready for use; it can’t actually free up space, for instance. It’s neat that you can have multiple systems passing data back and forth already, though!
John Marino finished another bulk build of pkgsrc, and reports a 96.4% package success rate, using DragonFly and pkgsrc-current. We’re just a week or so from the next quarterly pkgsrc freeze, come to think of it…
3.2 is the next major release of DragonFly, which will be relatively soon by the every-6-months release schedule. John Marino’s put together another catch-all bug report for that release.
Francois Tigeot has updated the ixgbe(4) driver, and Sepherosa Ziehau has added TSO support for bce(4) and additional bge(4) related chips, mostly from the FreeBSD drivers.
I was on the road and missed last week’s summaries for Summer of Code, and we’re almost at the end of the session, so I’ll just link to the most recent items from Mihai Carabas (there’s a lot there!), Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Freitas.
I recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc-2012Q2 on 64-bit DragonFly, though I still haven’t had a successfuly 32-bit build. However, John Marino has a report of how many packages are working on DragonFly in pkgsrc-current. (Answer: more than 95%)
Matthew Dillon recent posted a status report for Hammer 2. Of interest is the spanning tree protocol being built to handle messages between Hammer volumes. As he says in the message:
For example, we want to be able to have millions of diskless or cache-only clients be able to connect into a cluster and have it actually work…
(No, it doesn’t do this, yet.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI support and cleaned up the alc(4) driver. If you’re using a network card with the Atheros AR8131 or AR8132 chipsets, you should see an improvement.
Sascha Wildner has ported over more RocketRaid support, in the form of PCI IDs for various 4xxx and 3xxx series cards for hptiop(4), and a hpt27xx(4) driver that supports even more hardware.
Hammer 2 (or is it HAMMER2?) is nowhere near ready to test. But! For laughs, I think it could be set up just so you can watch the messages go back and forth. Someone want to set up a few DragonFly-current VMs and try?
Pierre Abbat is curious about using Hammer on an SSD. The discussion that came from that has some useful points, including notes that a straightforward SSD as disk works for most anything with Hammer other than very intensive database use, due to the history retention. If space is an issue, swapcache on the SSD and attaching a normal HDD is a fine alternative. A SSD with Hammer can leave some features off, though I’d argue that dedup is totally worth is. Also, SSD speed is directly correlated with size.
Sascha Wildner’s added support (from FreeBSD) for the HighPoint RocketRAID 17xx, 22xx, 23xx and 25xx, via the hptrr(4) driver.
Mihai Carabas has posted some more results from an 8-core system showing his efforts to make the scheduler multi-threading aware. The results are generally a 5% speed gain, which I think matches previous benchmarks on machines with less processors.