Matthew Dillon has gone after reducing contention and improving SMP performance as vigorously as possible, using dports builds on a 48-processor machine as a test. The machine’s building more than 1000 packages an hour, last I saw on IRC.
John Marino has updated ldns and drill to version 1.6.16.
There is a search plugin for Mozilla that searches DragonFly man pages. (Thanks Samuel Greear)
I got some PC-BSD items this week, too.
- Open Source Snapshot: GhostBSD.
- (Free)BSD and Dropbox.
- FreeBSD finally dumped rcs.
- FreeBSD’s igb(4) driver is updated to 2.4.0.
- FreeBSD’s binutils now has “support for assembling and disassembling Intel Random Number Generator extensions“.
- You can now use ‘athsurvey’ on AR5212 chipset ath(4) devices in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD branched version 11.
- FreeBSD has changes contributed by… Microsoft?
- PC-BSD has added a GUI version of their Life Preserver application.
- PC-BSD has a new ‘pc-zmanager’ program for managing ZFS and disks.
- PC-BSD has branched version 10, I think.
- NetBSD runs on the iMX233/OLinuXino.
- OpenBSD replaced rc4 with ChaCha20. No, I’m not sure what that means. (via)
- OpenBSD now has the vmwpvs(4) driver, for VMWare paravirtualized SCSI.
- OpenBSD has imported Mesa 9.2.1 and Freetype 2.5.0.1.
- OpenBSD supports the AM335x EDMA3 controller.
- OpenBSD supports the RTL8106E and RTL8168G/8111G networking chipsets.
- Diffe-Hellman key size increased in OpenBSD. It’s from NIST Special Publication 800-57, which is unavailable as of this typing because of the stupid U.S. government shutdown.
The pkgsrc repository in git for DragonFly is currently frozen. This is because many people have switched over to dports, and also because it’s a lot of work to keep it functional. If you do want to pull newer pkgsrc material, use cvs and grab it from a NetBSD server.
As the message notes, don’t go switching to DragonFly-current right now, cause there’s a lot of new material in there and it may not be quite safe. (There’s an ABI change that will require all new builds of your ports, for instance.)
BSD Now episode 4 is out, though you have to look at the episodes page to find it right now. It has an interview with Devin Teske of FreeBSD. The usual other commentary isn’t there, probably to make room for Devin’s completely awesome beard.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has added a new rconfig script that automatically mirrors the installed disks with ccd(4). You don’t remember what to do with rconfig(8)? Automatically (and headlessly) install DragonFly, of course! There’s already other examples – they’re just shell scripts.
I put together a list of what I’m thinking could be in the next DragonFly release. Going by our regular schedule, that’s a bit more than a month off. Of note: Summer of Code material and defaulting to dports. Follow the thread for more.
ZFS was originally created at Sun and open sourced. Sun was absorbed by Oracle and stopped being open (or even really existing), so ZFS was taken up by several separate groups – FreeBSD and Illumos being two examples. OpenZFS has been announced, in part to provide common reference for other platforms that might implement it and probably to avoid capability fragmentation. It’s certainly a good idea.
(If I have my history wrong, please correct me.)
DragonFly has two included compilers – GCC 4.4, and GCC 4.7. Traditionally, we switch from one compiler to the other as default, and then replace the old one with a newer release, and so on.
Until recently, dports built almost exclusively using GCC 4.4. John Marino’s switching to GCC 4.7, for a variety of reasons he lists in a recent post to users@. An interesting point that he raises: GCC 4.4 won’t necessarily be replaced with a newer GCC, but perhaps clang?
Sepherosa Ziehau has made a number of improvements to TCP in DragonFly – specifically, nonblocking and blocking connect(2) performance. See each of his commits for statistics on how much this has reduced processor use under high load. He has also written up an extensive description of how all this TCP stuff works in DragonFly.
In similar news, he has a nginx patch that delivers a significant performance increase. It may go into nginx itself.
I tagged it last week, but it took me a while to build the images. See the tag commit for a list of the bugfixes. The big thing for me is the fix for amrd and the virtual machine performance fix. Either update via git, or download an image.
All the machines in dragonflybsd.org should now be available over IPv6.
Also, Matthew Dillon did something weird to the DragonFly IPv6 network stack.
Sascha Wildner has ported rum(4), run(4), and urtwn(4) from FreeBSD to DragonFly, to work within the not-yet-default new USB framework. This happened some days ago, but I’m just now catching up.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master, is the final dragonflybsd.org system to be moved into the new colocated blade server. Your downloads of binary packages or DragonFly images should be speedier.
There’s several debates exclusive to the Unix-like world: Vi vs. Emacs, System V vs. BSD, and so on. A more recent one that people tend to fragment over is XML in config files vs. anything else. Read through this recent threa, starting here, about SMF (which became about XML) on users@.
I’ll be working on the 3.4.3 release of DragonFly within the next 24 hours, and it should be available this week. I’ll have a list of the bugfixes it contains…
It’s really neat to suddenly encounter something done just for DragonFly that you didn’t know was coming: A port of Go to DragonFly. I think these changes are going into the next Go release, or at least I hope so. (More on Go if you haven’t encountered it before.)
Just seen: EdgeBSD, a version of NetBSD with different goals in mind. (Seen on Hacker News)
The mailing list archives for DragonFly (lists.dragonflybsd.org) have been moved to new hardware. (Yay!) The patch that actually shows date in the listings needs to reapplied, cause Mailman is somewhat stale. (Boo!) I applied the patch and I’m regenerating all the archives now. (Yay!) There’s some garbled messages in the archives that cause a bunch of “no subject” partial messages to be dumped at the end. (Boo!) I’ll manually fix them if I can, someday. (Yay?)