I’ve linked to it before, but it’s expanded since: the Google Summer of Code projects page on dragonflybsd.org has a whole lot of ideas listed. Please add to it, especially if there’s a project you’d like to be doing. (Here’s more thoughts, for example.)
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
Venkatesh Srinivas did a comparison of the default scheduler in DragonFly with the “fairqueue” scheduler, using Interbench, the “interactivity benchmark”. The numbers don’t show a deficit relative to either side, which is OK I guess? I’m not sure how to analyze it.
I posted before about a move to use AT&T’s U-Verse fiber/DSL product for dragonflybsd.org’s connection. It led Matt Dillon to try to add features to compensate for the service’s shortcomings, but it’s still problematic. He’s written up just how broken U-Verse is, calling it “almost a complete failure” as a business connection. The bulk of the problems seem to come from the 2Wire DSL modem supplied by AT&T.
Remember when the Internet used to be the place to find long technical writeups of a product directly from people who were using it? Much of that has disappeared into comment forms and ephemeral Facebook posts. That’s too bad.
If you’re like me, you’ve been using XMMS for music playback since just about forever. It’s ancient, though. It uses GTK1, and since Thomas Klausner is trying to get GTK1 dependencies out of pkgsrc, he listed a roundup of alternatives on the pkgsrc-users mailing list, most/all of which are in pkgsrc. Pouya Tafti added some more.
The dragonflybsd.org sites (well, www anyway) are getting a new network connection, so expect a bit of downtime due to the transition.
The virtio network drivers for DragonFly (mentioned previously here, here, and here) went away. Apparently the original FreeBSD code was not supposed to be available publicly, under a BSD license, and it’s having a knock-on effect for DragonFly and probably NetBSD.
(virtio drivers, if this is an unfamiliar term, are for devices in virtual environments, as when DragonFly is running under VMWare or something similar.)
February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
pkgin, the binary pkgsrc manager similar to apt/yum, is now at version 0.4.0. You can get it now if you use pkgsrc-current, or just wait for the next quarterly pkgsrc release.
As Matthew Dillon notes in a recent post, procedures are now assumed to be MPSAFE (i.e. without the Giant Lock) by default. Any new work should follow this idea, and it doesn’t have to be documented specially. The inverse used to be true, where the code that happened to work without the Lock was rare, and therefore needed to be pointed out. Now, the good result is the norm.
Nuno Antunes has been working on upgrading netgraph(4) to version 7. His initial patches are available for testing.
Peter Avalos went looking for updates to /bin/sh, and found a lot of them, including regression tests. Even though sh is… 15 years old? Older? It dates back to BSD 4.4 and before – anyway, it’s been around forever, but there’s still things to do with it.
So, I felt lucky recently. I updated shiningsilence.com from DragonFly 2.6 to DragonFly 2.8, and wanted to upgrade my pkgsrc packages from pkgsrc-2010Q3 to pkgsrc-2010Q4.
You can do this with pkg_rolling-replace, or various other tools, but I wanted to see if I could do it completely with binary packages. I used pkg_radd -uv <pkgname> for each of the major packages I had installed.
Surprisingly, it worked, for every package. I had to force-install some Perl modules because I was moving from 5.10 to 5.12, but I think I may have been able to use an additional -u switch to get by that problem. I did use pkg_leaves to identify packages I didn’t need, and removed them to reduce the number of items to upload.
It was exactly what I wanted. Previous pkgsrc upgrades had taken most of a day, as I had to build from source and figure out what went where. We’ve had a better success rate in bulk builds recently, and this paid off in an upgrade process that only took perhaps an hour.
If you’re interested in mentoring for DragonFly and Google Summer of Code for 2011, please speak up. You don’t have to mentor if you don’t see any projects you like – I just need an initial count for the application. If you don’t want to mentor at all, but you’ve got ideas: there’s a place to tell people about it.
Peter Avalos updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0d, due to a recently discovered bug. He’s also brought the fix back to DragonFly 2.6 and 2.8, so it’s available for most anyone.
BIND version 9.5 has reached End of Life status. In fact, it did it some time ago. However, net/bind95 in pkgsrc has just been deleted. Update to 9.6/9.7, if you still had9.5 in place.
If you’re using the binary pkgsrc package installer pkgin, version 0.4 is available for testing.
They’re finally uploaded! See my rather lengthy post about it on users@ for all the details.
Chris Turner went off into some extra detail on how the rc system works, with extra links for anyone interested in some history.
Due to a crash yesterday on git.dragonflybsd.org, the Git repo was not up to date, briefly. It’s been fixed. This will only really matter if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly and rebuilt your system in the last 24 hours or so.