Category: Goings-on

Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever.  Here’s parts one, two, and three.  There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.

I’ve been working on a small house project over the past few days.  My house has a basement workroom, which I use for whatever I need to do involving pliers or a saw.  I’ve been slowly outfitting it over the past few years, and one thing I wanted to do was to wire it for music.

Not just a radio, but a computer that I could play sound file from, and stream audio.  You can buy hardware for just that, but I’m cheap.  I also wanted to keep it from looking like a computer desk; I have enough of that in my life already.  This is a minor project; nothing like what you’d find on Instructables, but entertaining because it let me use DragonFly.

I purchased a set of cheap speakers from Newegg.  You’ll notice that the speakers have a metal frame that forms a loop at the bottom – that’s important later.  I bought the speakers and hooked to a tiny netbook, running DragonFly 3.0.2.  It works fine for playing music, though the case speaker doesn’t shut off when external ones are attached.  That’s not a problem here, though, since it’s not loud enough to be audible over the separate speaker output.

Those metal loops on the bottoms of the speakers turned out to be handy.  I found some scrap wood, and built a small armature to fit inside the loop and hold it offset from the ceiling joist.  Both of these wooden blocks could have the speaker slide over it, upside down.

I stained both of the blocks so that they wouldn’t stand out against the dark wood of the workroom ceiling.

I affixed the wooden hangers as far out as the cord on the speakers would let me,  and slid the upside-down speakers onto them.  There’s enough length in the cords to place the separate volume control dial on the workbench, and I’m done.

You can see the ceiling speaker in the upper corner.  How’s the sound?  Okayish.  You aren’t going to get much out of a set of speakers this cheap, but at least I don’t have wires over my work area, and I don’t have to worry about puncturing a speaker with a screwdriver by accident, or something similar.  I can close the laptop to keep it at least somewhat protected.

This is not a terribly complex project, but it makes me happy to have a DragonFly-based jukebox when I’m home.  (This laptop usually travels with me.)  I’m playing the music with mpg123, which is a surprisingly capable command-line player for files and for streaming audio.

(Yes, that is a large black velvet painting of a bullfight in the background.  It was a wedding present.  I also have black velvet paintings of Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Fat Elvis, and Jesus blessing a tractor-trailer.  I don’t know why.)

John Marino has changed the default search path for ldconfig; it no longer looks along /usr/lib/gcc* since that’s already included via rpath.  The end result: you will need to do ‘make upgrade’ after your next buildworld build/installworld.

A torrent for DragonFly 3.0.2, found via Google search.  Which ISO or img files does it include?  I don’t know.  Which architectures?  I don’t know.  Is it legit?  I don’t know.  Click at your own risk, just like any other link.

DragonFly 3.0.2 is out, and you can update (see /usr/src/UPDATING) an existing install or download a new one.  This release turns off I/O APIC when booting in a VM because it caused issues for some users.

Matthew Dillon has posted a link to the errata for the AMD CPU bug that he found.   Venkatesh Srinivas has followed with a test case for the bug.

Matthew Dillon also pointed out there’s a workaround to fix it, with no performance impact, it’s only found on revision 10h CPUs (not Bulldozer), and it’s extremely hard to duplicate.  Why draw such a heavy line under that?  The news of this bug rippled out through various news sites and was almost universally misreported, in a way that made it look bad for AMD without actually realistically quantifying the problem.  Remember, it took 6 months just to find it – and he was looking for it!

 

 

John Marino’s updated DragonFly’s version of GCC 4.4 to 4.4.7, apparently the final version of GCC 4.4.  What’s next?  I imagine GCC 4.6 at some point.  It’s always a fun (maybe bikeshed-ish) conversation on which compiler to install, and which to have in base.

As several people have told me, there’s benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 vs. 2.10, available on Phoronix.   CPU performance shows a significant improvement, in tests that actually test it.   (I’d think a file compression test would be disk-limited, for instance.)   Disk performance isn’t as great, but that may be in part because Hammer no longer will starve reading to benefit writing; that makes benchmarks look worse but improves real-world interactivity.  I’m sure there’s more quibbling to do, since it’s lies, damn lies benchmarks.

If for some reason you needed DragonFly 2.6 ISOs, or older, there’s a mirror.

If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.

I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:

“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it.  I don’t know if it still applies.

Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.

Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs.  Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.