Gnat-aux is the way to go

John Marino has pointed out, with a number of examples, that gnat-aux is the best pkgsrc-based compiler for DragonFly right now, in terms of compatibility and support.  It’s certainly good news if you are an Ada programmer.  He lists some interesting numbers to demonstrate this superiority, though you can’t buildworld with it yet.  (gcc 4.4, on DragonFly as part of the system, will do this normally.)

How much RAM is too little?

If you’re running DragonFly on a very low-end system, you may be wondering about memory requirements for Hammer.  Hammer is much less RAM-hungry than ZFS, so it looks like you can get away with 128M, as long as you don’t mind the occasional error message.  You can manually tweak settings for it if you like.  256M is plenty.

It still strikes me as odd to consider systems with less than 1G of RAM as “low-memory”.  What rich times we live in!

Better MSI support

That’s Managed System Interrupts, for when your hardware is passing a lot of data and generating a lot of corresponding hardware interrupts.  MSI is what deals with all that traffic.  High-bandwidth (10G) network cards, for instance.  Anyway, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made more commits than what I’m linking to here, for support with various devices.

There’s many other MSIs out there, oddly enough.