bugs.dragonflybsd.org has seen a lot more activity lately, with the number of reported issues down by a third, to around 100. If you want to help out, try to replicate an older bug (especially ones from DragonFly 1.4), and mention if it doesn’t seem to be around any more. If you’re a developer, there’s a number of small patches under ‘feature’ that would be easy to check and commit.
Dru Lavigne has a new article up on ONLamp.com/BSD, called “Fun with X.org“. Not all of it applies to DragonFly, but it covers some interesting utilities like xnest, DMX, and xwatchwin.
Something that a lot of people could find useful: an extra multiprocessor kernel on the LiveCD. It’s apparently easy to add. (with tweaks) Any takers before January?
Vlad Galu posted jemalloc, noting that it performed well when freeing many small objects. (Along the same lines, Thomas E. Spanjaard brought up Google’s tcmalloc, though it’s not complete.) A benchmark showed good results, and Freddie Cash pointed at prior discussion for use in FreeBSD. It’ll take more persuasive numbers to get it in DragonFly, though.
Since the next release is coming up, I’m trying to clean out as many old bugs as possible. About a third of the bugs at bugs.dragonflybsd.org are cleaned out, but some of the remaining ones are older and may no longer apply.
If you’ve ever posted a bug to the bugs@ mailing list, please give bugs.dragonflybsd.org a look and make sure you don’t have any old issues sitting there.
Matthew Dillon wrote up an idea on how to adaptively deal with interrupt routing. He’s not working actively on it, so it’s available as a (possibly performance-enhancing) project.
(via hubertf) BasicallyTech.com has an article up about using bc, the command line calculator. Basic but useful. I often type ‘cal‘, thinking that’s what I need for a calculator.
geom_nbsd is a module that lets a FreeBSD machine read the disklabels from other BSD machines, including DragonFly.
BSDStats.org sent out a summary of reporting hosts; there’s about 2,000 FreeBSD users and almost nobody else on other architectures. There’s only one DragonFly user reporting in North America, which I assume is me.
Peter Avalos has a port of OpenBSD’s dhclient program available for testing. The OpenBSD version runs with reduced privileges, compared to the current DragonFly dhclient.
Also, Victor Balada Diaz has his newest version of the jail code, allowing multiple IPs within a jail and also IPv6.
The newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Thomas Spanjaard. He’s currently working on an upgrade of the disk system.
Matthew Dillon posted an in-depth explanation of how he plans to both simplify and speed up filesystem access, starting after the start of the new year.
I posted about it before, but Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert supplied more details: there’s going to be a DragonFly hackathon at the 23rd Chaos Communication Congress in Berlin at the end of the year. Visit the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet if you’d like to coordinate rooms/board/meeting up.
This could be quite good; the recent NetBSD hackathon generated a lot of results.
Dmitri Nikulin happened to post an interesting idea: complete virtualization of DragonFly. (Last paragraph of message.) It’s similar to Inferno.
BSDNews has an interesting link to a Inquirer article benchmarking the new Intel processors. While it does wander into excessive acronyms, it’s interesting that the benchmarking is done using a variety of BSDs.
Are you going to the 23C3 (23rd Chaos Communication Congress) conference at the end of 2006? If so, there’s an informal DragonFly Hackathon planned, as a number of DragonFly developers will be there. There’s a list of potential tasks on the wiki.
‘nega’ reports a DragonFly 1.4 has gone for most of a year without issue; good news for an operating system undergoing heavy surgery.
A fellow named Trismegistos is interested in creating an Italian BSD community; if you’re interested, contact him at tr1sm3g1st0s@gmail.com.