Peter Avalos has updated a bunch of third-party software: tcpdump, libpcap, libarchive, tnftp, xz, and OpenPAM. Thanks Peter! If you need more info on what these things are, the information is out there.
John Marino has added a ‘gcc47’ compiler ccvar, so you can build world and kernel with it. ‘It’ is actually gcc-aux, since it seems to work better than the basic (“vanilla”?) gcc47. You also get Ada support, though that wasn’t the driving reason to pick it. This is brand new so don’t try it unless you’re ready to discover issues.
Is there any other BSD able to use gcc 4.7 for world/kernel? Even 4.6? Most of the attention has been on clang.
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)
Nuno Antunes is still working on that netgraph upgrade. Among other changes, ng_tty has been added. What’s it do? Something with ppp, I think.
From a thread on users@, I bring you Visible Capacitor Failures. If the problems pictured are new to you… trust me, you will see them up close someday.
Someone trying DragonFly couldn’t get it to start, and appeared to have a confused disk. It looks like the system BIOS were at fault, and Matt Dillon has an explanation of this minefield. (Including some comments on 4k physical disk sectors.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI-X support to igb(4), the Intel PRO/1000 gigabit network card. What does that mean? The commit message mentions a default transmit rate of 1.48Mpps small packets, which is good?
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
Francois Tigeot has added the Intel PRO/10GbE driver from FreeBSD, or ixgbe(4). A couple features are turned off, for now.
Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.
More benchmarks, in this case a comparison of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and DragonFly. I’m not even sure how to derive meaning from it.
This is a report for last week’s work, so this is week 6 we are in now, and the reports are week 5’s status. So:
If you have an Intel processor with multiple cores and hyperthreading support, you can compile a new kernel and try out Mihia Carabas’s GSoC work already; he’s created a test using the OpenSSL test case to time scheduling performance vs. number of threads.
Mihai Carabas posted some benchmarks for his work with the DragonFly default scheduler and hyperthreaded CPUs. The end result, for those who don’t like number analysis, is that CPU-dependent speeds are reliably constant because tasks are being evenly scheduled across available CPUs.
(Well, CPU threads, since this is hyperthreading, but you get the idea.)
Based on a suggestion from Venkatesh Srinivas, tmpfs now uses a red-black tree for directory lookups, and is also now faster. Credit goes to Johannes Hofmann for doing the testing.
Sascha Wildner has synced find(1) with what’s in FreeBSD, which means there’s a lot more options available – see the commit for details. Many of them are for GNU compatibility, and I’m sure I’ll forget them all. I seem to have issues remembering how to use find(1) successfully.
I think it’s week four, at least.
Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas all have their weekly status reports up for Summer of Code. Unfortunately, Loganaden Velvindron received a great job offer out of the blue, so he no longer has time for Summer of Code. (He plans to continue involvement in DragonFly, however.)
Sascha Wildner has made it easier to use alternative syntax checking systems as a “lint” make target in DragonFly. His usage of coccinelle, as one of these alternatives, has already found many bugs – just today, for instance.
Is “alternative syntax checking systems” the right phrase for this? I don’t know. “Correctness checker”? My phrases all sound like something you’d read on a government form.