Phoronix has another set of benchmarks that include DragonFly and PC-BSD, along with several Linux distributions. It’s interesting to see, though don’t take them as performance measurements. 7-Zip as a benchmark doesn’t describe much other than the program itself, and the Himeno benchmark results are because of the compiler in use rather than any underlying performance aspect of the operating system – for instance. The DragonFly benchmarks disappear after page 3.
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.4.2. The major reasons for this point release were fixes for DragonFly under Xen with more than 2 CPUs specified, and for booting x86_64 DragonFly in KVM. The 3.4.2 tagged commit has every detail.
If you’ve already got a working 3.4.1 installation, you don’t need to rush to upgrade; this is mostly for the people affected by the issues listed above. I’m working on 3.4.2 install images; give that some time to complete and upload if you need one.
Rados?aw Szymczyszyn has manged to get support for DragonFly’s bootloader into GRUB. This is part of his Master’s project to make DragonFly multiboot capable, at least for i386.
(I love having new things show up from new people, out of the blue.)
Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.
John Marino managed to update GCC from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 (4.7 changelog), zlib from 1.2.7 to 1.2.8 (changelog), and awk from 20110810 to 20121220 (can’t find a changelog).
In other update news, Matt Dillon has been working on HAMMER2’s flush sequencing.
Update: tcsh too.
I’ve put the 3.4 release images up on terasaur, a Bittorrent seeding site. Please try pulling them and let me know how it goes. I haven’t torrented many things, so I am unsure how to even verbify “torrent’. Hopefully that sentence and those links work out.
If you’re looking to install DragonFly on a Kimsufi server, and you can read French, this explanation may help you. (via Enjolras on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Have you ever wondered about how the booting process works on DragonFly? Well, Ivan Uemlianin did, out loud. Several different recommendations followed, so now you can learn too.
‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.
As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.
If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.
John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.
Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.
Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.
NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is this weekend, 4/20/2013. Fancy as it sounds, it’s really a single-day hackathon around open software and hardware, with the problems to fix coming from NASA and therefore probably very unique. It’s happening in a bunch of places around the world, but there’s one right here in my town.
Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.
Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:
- We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
- Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
- I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
- dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.
I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.
The very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd edition), signed by Michael W. Lucas, is being auctioned off in a charity event for OpenBSD. There’s 5 days left to bid, though the price is already somewhere north of $2 per page.
The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)
If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.
Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.