I proposed some changes to the way DragonFly does releases, and how we handle pkgsrc binary builds. The thread on kernel@ is a bit long, so just read my summation. My idea for a longer release cycle didn’t really fly, but pkgsrc binaries will be built on a rolling basis, I think.
From what I can tell, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made some changes where you can control TCP timeout and keepalive timing on a per-tcpcb basis, or at least that’s what I gleaned from the docs. He’s been doing a lot of work lately, but it’s hard to link to because so much of it is at a basic level that makes it difficult to summarize in terms of how the features affect the user.
DragonFly had another good year with Google’s Summer of Code program. We had 6 slots, and 5 passed projects. (Irinia, if you’re reading this – where did you go?) This is our 4th year participating in Summer of Code, with I think the highest number of passed projects to date.
Here’s all the finished projects, with links to the original descriptions:
- Bring kernel event notification in DragonFly BSD to its logical conclusion – Samuel Greear
- Implementing a mirror target for device mapper – Adam Hoka
- Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy – Brills Peng
- Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD – Nick Prokharau
- Porting Virtio Drivers from NetBSD to DragonFly BSD to speed up DragonFly BSD as a KVM guest – Stephanie Ouillon
Thanks is also due to the mentors and other that helped out, via IRC and email: Aggelos Economopoulos, Alex Hornung, Joe Talbott, Matthias Schmidt, Michael Neumann, Nathaniel Filardo, Pratyush Kshirsagar, Sascha Wildner, Thomas Nikolajsen, and Venkatesh Srinivas
You can also check the Digest’s “Google Summer of Code” category for progress reports made as the summer went on. The source code from the projects is available at the DragonFly/SOC 2011 Google Project Page. In even better news, 2 of the projects have already been partially committed to DragonFly – Brills Peng’s scheduler work, and Adam Hoka’s device mapper mirror project.
For reasons unknown to me, there’s enough functional change between PHP 5.2 and PHP 5.3 that it affected a lot of PHP-based programs. For that reason, PHP 5 in pkgsrc defaults to the 5.2 version. However, it’s going to be 5.3 for the next stable quarterly release of pkgsrc. In theory, all PHP5-dependent programs are ready to handle that now. Note that PHP 5.3 is already in pkgsrc; it just wasn’t the default. If you were using the php53 package, it may require some manual fiddling at your next upgrade of pkgsrc packages.
Some ISA devices have been removed from DragonFly. That probably affects approximately 0% of everyone, cause they’re old devices, but a few of them are were in the GENERIC kernel configs, so you’ll get an error for an unrecognized option when you next rebuild your kernel using a GENERIC-based config, based on an older version of GENERIC. The description of which drivers went is quite sensibly placed in UPDATING.
At some point, you may want to generate binary programs that are unstripped of debugging information. You may want to generate them with pkgsrc. Here’s a little note on what options will make that happen.
The ‘freeze’ period (when bugfixes are the only addition) for pkgsrc will start on September 18th, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q3, scheduled for the 25th. Think of it as an early Christmas present.
John Marino, who already has commit access for DragonFly, now also has commit access for pkgsrc. What does this mean? It means if you have a pkgsrc problem, submit it through NetBSD’s Problem Report system as normal, and maybe let him know about it too. He’s already made some DragonFly-specific fixes.
I posted some ideas about changing how DragonFly does releases. In short, I’d like to see a long term release, and otherwise point people at a rolling release; e.g. that day’s build. There are other people that think the same way about speeding up releases of other software. (Thanks, Samuel Greear for that last link)
Happy birthday to my younger daughter, Claire, who is 9 today. That’s a much better anniversary to celebrate today.
- A musing about the waveform and how it’s the most iconic representation of music. It’s also a holdover from analog days, if you think about it. (via)
- There seems to be a new kinda-improper activity from GoDaddy found every 6 months or so. Find yourself a new registrar, if you haven’t already.
- Here’s how you know DragonFly is actually getting somewhere: exploits show up.
- Not directly BSD related, but it’s from Colin Percival, writing as “FreeBSD Security Officer”. With the recent Diginotar news, he points out what’s the best secure certificate to forge.
- Introduction to Arduino, a comic guide. (via)
- “A jpeg is worth 1000kb“, talking about ZORK and other text adventures. Look for the twisty column of familiar phrases, all alike. The Interactive Fiction genre of game is still going surprisingly strong, so many years later.
- That article about ZORK links to this excellent, excellent exploration of the original Colossal Cave game, which led to Adventure and so many other games. Oh yeah, the author was building ARPANet at the time, too.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Chainsawsuit.
Noticed through a saved Google search: DragonFly BSD support as part of Puppet. This was thanks to the work of a ‘jaydg’. Thanks, person whose name I probably should know!
The recent OpenBSD 5.0 pre-release announcement on undeadly notes that ALTQ is being replaced by new priority settings. This should make it to DragonFly at some point, since pf in DragonFly has been catching up to the current version of pf in OpenBSD, thanks to the efforts of Jan Lentfer…
Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy. I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.
The next release of pkgin, the binary package installer for pkgsrc, is imminent. I link to the note about this because the new features list sounds good, including a significant speedup.
This week has taught me one thing for sure: Always make sure your backup generator is working. And over-plan battery capacity. That’s actually two things, but what the heck. I’m tired, for reasons that can probably be inferred! I’m not the only one suffering these problems, it seems.
- There is a certain subset of readers here that will find this fascinating: a video of a game postmortem. Specifically, Elite. (via) Needs Flash.
- This is as good an article as any I’ve seen describing where the tablet computer market is going, at The Economist.
- Remember RetroBSD, mentioned here previously? Here’s some discussion of it.
- EuroBSDCon’s 2011 conference is open for registration, but the early bird discount only lasts until the end of August, so jump on it soon if you’re thinking of going. It’s the 10th anniversary of the event!
- PHP 5.3 is coming to pkgsrc as default, soon? The PHP 5.2 -> 5.3 transition seems to mess up a lot of code because of some changes in the way things are handled, or at least that’s my experience, so watch out.
- Make sure you aren’t running mod_deflate on your Apache 2.x server.
- Kristaps Dzonsons, the fellow behind mdocml (which is in DragonFly now and mentioned here before) is working on a mdoc manual. It’s an actual book, with examples. It’s titled “Practical UNIX Manuals: mdoc”, which sounds like part of a series, though I don’t know if there’s anything else. I’d sure like it if there was. (via Undeadly.) Look very closely at the mdoc web page and you will see the markup, too. Neat!
- Breakout treated as a musical instrument, in 1983. That’s too glib a summary of this explanation of an old book studying the game Breakout and playing it. Really, read the article, and remember that the book described would just be lost in a sea of
blog postsnoise today. (via)
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Wonderella. This is the comic that ruined Batman for me. I can’t unthink it.
There are only 45 packages out of over 10,000 in pkgsrc that do not support being installed by people who aren’t root, or in different locations. Thomas Klausner has that list of 45 packages. It’s very close to zero packages with this problem at this point, so if you want to make a big difference…
As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work. Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly? Please share details!
Anton Panev is working on a Google Summer of Code project for NetBSD, adding support in pkgsrc for RPM/Debian package formats. He posted a status report recently; will this come to DragonFly via pkgsrc? I don’t know!
Ah, August. The month where everybody goes on vacation. I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.
- Friday was whyday. (via) I can certainly agree with the sentiment.
- Panic panic panic panic panic panic panic
- Not BSD or even software, but good to see: a kid, math, and solar power. (via Tomas Bodzar)
- More BSD videos, this time from BSDCan2011 and Google Tech Talks.
- The future’s gone meta: there are now game modifications which emulate real computer hardware in that virtual world. (via) It’s not turtles all the way down; it’s emulators.
Your unrelated comic link of the week: Nedroid. “Beartato” is one of the best names ever.
Yeah, unrelated links seem to always be comics. They offer the most reading.
Assertions, in DragonFly, are places in the code where the programmer lists a condition, and tells the system to panic if the condition doesn’t exist. It’s a good way to guard against weird situations, when something ends up with a strange value. Do you actually use them while programming? Then Adam Hoka’s patch to print file name and line number when the assertion hits will be useful to you.