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.
Sepherosa Ziehau has some suggestions for anyone looking for some kernel hacking. They’re mostly based around busdma(9).
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down right now so I’m linking to the MARC kernel@ post.
There’s a post on the mailing list tech-pkg@netbsd.org of currently broken packages for the next quarterly release. It’s not a lot of stuff, but if something you need is on there, don’t worry too much. If you follow the thread through its replies, there’s a lot of fixing going on.
MARC, which stands for Mailing list ARChives, has a lot of mailing lists. It now includes the DragonFly users@ list, along with the others. (It’s not linked in *BSD on the main MARC page yet, but it should be soon.) It’s worth digging through the massive, massive wall of text on that page to find a mailing list you didn’t know existed.
This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too. This only applies if you’re running DragonFly 3.1, of course.
I got the old mailing list archives converted to Mailman. As I wrote in a post to users@, please let me know about problems. There’s some garbled messages from the old archive that were placed into the 2012-Sept. section for each message; I’ll be cleaning those up manually.