We (as in DragonFly) are not participating in Google Code-In this year, but I’m happy to see there’s another BSD in there – NetBSD. (There’s only 10 participating organizations, so it’s not easy.) Look at their page if you’re in the right age range to do projects.
MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a ‘liveUSB’ distribution of DragonFly with software preinstalled, has been updated to run using DragonFly 3.2.1 as a base. The linked page contains screenshots and a description of what comes out-of-the-box. (mentioned previously here.)
Today is the day that FreeBSD moves to using clang by default. This is not necessarily a surprise, but I like the finality of calling it “Clang-Day”. I think Clang will probably be the next compiler brought into DragonFly’s base system, instead of the next release of gcc. Don’t make any bets on my statement, though, cause I certainly won’t be the one doing it. (It’s hard.)
There was one more file to change for the bmake import, so if you are running DragonFly 3.3 and updated between the 28th and 30th of October, do a full rebuild.
I mentioned this before in the Lazy Reading from last Sunday, but it’s worth a second look: Apple’s new Fusion Drive product appears to be very much like DragonFly’s swapcache. DragonFly doesn’t have exclusive right to the idea of caching on a faster disk, clearly, so I’m not complaining that it’s “ours”. It’s frustrating to see product announcement/press releases stumbling all over this like it’s a new thing.
Then again, having new ideas about technology ideas and making sure they spread is one of the points of the BSD license, so perhaps there’s no good reason to complain at all.
(Before anyone reads too much into this: No, I don’t know of any direct relationship between swapcache and Fusion Drive; they may have no common background other than structure.)
A thread on pkgsrc-users@ reminds me: adding a specific line for bin-install will save time when rebuilding packages; pkgsrc will use existing binary packages instead of rebuilding from source when possible, when this is set. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it does.
Sandip Jadhav asked if anyone was working on an I/O scheduler. Chris Turner replied with a “no”, but also with a list of places to look for details on writing one, which I’m linking here for posterity.
John Marino is working on a very good idea: bringing bmake into DragonFly as a replacement for the current ‘make’. bmake is going through more active development and apparently also in use/will be used? on FreeBSD, so syncing up with the same make flavor as FreeBSD and NetBSD will help everyone. It’ll also remove the problem where you ‘make’ everything in DragonFly, except pkgsrc packages which you ‘bmake’. It’s not changed over yet.
(What does OpenBSD use for make?)
A conversation about compilers in the DragonFly base system led peeter (must) to describe his group’s use of OpenMPI on DragonFly for physics calculations. Apparently he’s had a significant performance improvement on DragonFly.
Along similar lines, John Marino helped out by bringing in libssp and libgomp for gcc 4.7 for use with OpenMP. (This is in DragonFly 3.3, not 3.2).
John Marino did a bulk build of pkgsrc using gcc 4.7.2, and posted the results. The result? About 1% of packages that built with gcc 4.4 did not build with 4.7.2. Whether that’s a problem with gcc or a problem with how each of those software packages were created by the original authors, I don’t know.
Google is hosting a ‘Doc Camp’, where people get together and write documentation for open source projects. There’s a page that talks about it. Last year’s inaugural event was apparently quite successful. I haven’t been to it, but I think a day just for documentation is a good idea.
I’m planning for DragonFly 3.2 to come with pkgsrc-2012Q3, the most recent release. I’m building binary packages to match, and the build should complete by the time we release on the 22nd…
Notice I said “should” – sometimes the universe conspires against bulk builds.
I branched 3.2 tonight. That means 2 weeks until release, so sharpen your bug-poking sticks!
(I’m very tired and unable to think of good analogies, sorry.)
Cause it could be added. The new algorithm could replace SHA-2, in use now in DragonFly. SHA-2 has not been ‘broken’ yet, so it’s not an emergency… yet.
I recreated the by-month thread and date listing from the old mailing lists, but for Mailman. It’s at lists.dragonflybsd.org.
Since the most recent branch of pkgsrc has been released, perl5 in pkgsrc has been updated to 5.16.1, and (ancient) python 2.5 has been removed.
Debian squished with DragonFly, sorta like Debian/kFreeBSD? Don’t know if it will work, but what the heck.
As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd. That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too. It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages. 3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.
The machine that runs www.dragonflybsd.org and bugs.dragonflybsd.org is currently down. While it gets figured out, Alex Hornung has a static copy of the dragonflybsd.org main website available.