Welcome our newest committer: Markus Pfeiffer. He’s ‘profmakx’ on EFNet #dragonfly, and has been working on a port of FreeBSD’s USB infrastructure – which I am looking forward to, tremendously.
Google has announced their projects accepted for Summer of Code: DragonFly has 4 projects of the 1,212 funded:
- Vishesh Yadav – Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
- Mihai Carabas – Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
- Loganaden Velvindron – Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
- Ivan Sichmann Freitas – 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels
(Hopefully those links are to visible pages) We had way more good proposals than available mentors/slot, unfortunately. So if you didn’t get in, think about next year, or maybe look at doing the work on your own; there’s some great ideas out there that I’d like to see happen.
Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org. If you’re doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help. (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)
I’m still working on building them. I kept getting panics, which seem to be fixed by this commit, so I should have something soon. Sorry!
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!
Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted. There’s also the vquota(8) man page.
Based on a recent post from Chris Turner to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list, here’s a bug report that should get you to a working lang/OpenJDK7 pkgsrc package.
DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What’s that mean? SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost. The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked. So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations.
(Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.
If you’re curious about Hammer2 development, it’s been ongoing, but there haven’t been any more juicy commits to point at. Here’s one – the start of the messaging system.
DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone. What’s this mean? Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post. The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade. The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat. Or not; this is pretty technical.
DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code. That’s great! We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.
Thanks to Sascha Wildner, the Areca RAID controller driver, arcmsr(4), now supports MSI. It should only make things better, but if it doesn’t, you can turn it off.
Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever. Here’s parts one, two, and three. There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.
I’ve been working on a small house project over the past few days. My house has a basement workroom, which I use for whatever I need to do involving pliers or a saw. I’ve been slowly outfitting it over the past few years, and one thing I wanted to do was to wire it for music.
Not just a radio, but a computer that I could play sound file from, and stream audio. You can buy hardware for just that, but I’m cheap. I also wanted to keep it from looking like a computer desk; I have enough of that in my life already. This is a minor project; nothing like what you’d find on Instructables, but entertaining because it let me use DragonFly.
I purchased a set of cheap speakers from Newegg. You’ll notice that the speakers have a metal frame that forms a loop at the bottom – that’s important later. I bought the speakers and hooked to a tiny netbook, running DragonFly 3.0.2. It works fine for playing music, though the case speaker doesn’t shut off when external ones are attached. That’s not a problem here, though, since it’s not loud enough to be audible over the separate speaker output.
Those metal loops on the bottoms of the speakers turned out to be handy. I found some scrap wood, and built a small armature to fit inside the loop and hold it offset from the ceiling joist. Both of these wooden blocks could have the speaker slide over it, upside down.
I stained both of the blocks so that they wouldn’t stand out against the dark wood of the workroom ceiling.
I affixed the wooden hangers as far out as the cord on the speakers would let me, and slid the upside-down speakers onto them. There’s enough length in the cords to place the separate volume control dial on the workbench, and I’m done.
You can see the ceiling speaker in the upper corner. How’s the sound? Okayish. You aren’t going to get much out of a set of speakers this cheap, but at least I don’t have wires over my work area, and I don’t have to worry about puncturing a speaker with a screwdriver by accident, or something similar. I can close the laptop to keep it at least somewhat protected.
This is not a terribly complex project, but it makes me happy to have a DragonFly-based jukebox when I’m home. (This laptop usually travels with me.) I’m playing the music with mpg123, which is a surprisingly capable command-line player for files and for streaming audio.
(Yes, that is a large black velvet painting of a bullfight in the background. It was a wedding present. I also have black velvet paintings of Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Fat Elvis, and Jesus blessing a tractor-trailer. I don’t know why.)
Sascha Wildner has updated mfi(4), the LSI MegaRAID SAS driver , via FreeBSD and LSI. SAS2208-based controllers are now supported.