Thomas Nikolajsen wrote some tips on starting a NFS client on DragonFly; I’m linking to them both because they’re generally handy and specifically so I can have them for later…
Gergo Szakal mentioned some ideas he had about binary upgrades; among other parts of the conversation, Samuel J. Greear/Sascha Wildner reminded everyone that Matthias Schmidt had ported the FreeBSD binary upgrade system over in late 2007, and it’s still around to play with.
Jan Lentfer’s posted the exact steps to migrate from BIND as part of the base system to BIND out of pkgsrc. The actual commit hasn’t happened yet.
This will only affect you when upgrading 2.7; DragonFly 2.6 still has BIND in it, and this won’t affect non-2.7 users until the next release.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has posted his results from testing Alex Hornung’s experimental I/O scheduler. Results are positive, and he also lists exactly how to download the code and test it on your own system. It’s worth trying, especially if you have DragonFly for a desktop.
Here’s some explicit instructions for upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6.
If for some reason you don’t have a /usr/src directory:
mkdir -p /usr/src cd /usr/src && git init git remote add origin git://git.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git git fetch origin git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
If you already have a /usr/src/ directory, you can just do the last 3 steps:
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
And then you can perform the normal “make buildworld…” steps outlined in /usr/src/UPDATING.
We’ve got 28 applications for Summer of Code, approximately what we had last year. If you’re a student, hold tight. We’ve got until the 21st to get everyone matched up, student <-> mentor.
Jan Lentfer’s ready to remove BIND from the base system; test out his changes if you’re running a DragonFly-based name server and want to see how it’ll work.
‘dylanr’ has built 2 interesting films using Gource to visualize DragonFly development; he’s mentioned them in comments here, but I want to make sure people see them.
Update: see the full multi-year film of DragonFly commits linked in the comments by dylanr; thanks for doing this!
Jan Lentfer’s done some new benchmarking of PostgreSQL on Hammer. There’s further suggestions and a more complete benchmark is planned, taking advantage of the Hammer improvements in 2.6. In the meantime, you can look at previous benchmarks.
DragonFly 2.6 is out! Download from a mirror, check the release page, and enjoy the large number of new features. There’s a full set of binary packages built, too.
Technically, this is 2.6.1, since 2.6.0 was tagged a week ago and 2.6.1 has all the last minute fixes since then.
Gource is a tool for visualizations from version control history; the video page has some examples. (via) I’d love to see this run on DragonFly. I’m curious to see what would happen on a huge, old repo, like NetBSD. Please hlep me, intarwebs!
2.6 will probably be out within the next 24 hours. We’re just waiting on the packages, though we’re probably in the clear already.
Be ready for mild confusion with this and the current Linux kernel. I know it’ll happen.
Daniel Lorch’s work on porting Hammer to Linux (read-only, currently) has been moved to a new location.
Newegg is having a big SSD sale; I’m repasting the email with models and prices here. Use it for swapcache! There’s also a promo page with fancy images.
Did you know Linux still had Big Kernel Lock issues? I didn’t. Plus: yay for new KernelTrap activity! Unless this is some sort of April Fools’s prank…
If you’re interested in software design, this blog post may have some good links to follow.
The April Open Source Business Resource is out, on “Cloud Computing”.
Alex Hornung has posted an elaborate summary of his I/O scheduler work, with details on usage. He reports speed improvements under heavy load. If this sounds interesting to you (and it should), it’s possible to test his changes right now.
Alex Hornung has been working on an I/O scheduler; he’s made some graphs to show results so far. They’re plain, but pictures are always fun.
The newest BSDTalk has a 25-minute conversation with Sam Smith, who helped organize EuroBSDCon 2009 and other UKUUG events.
Thanks to work from Samuel J. Greear and Alex Hornung:
- Install Firefox (natively)
- libflashsupport and adobe-flash-plugin
- mount linprocfs
- null mount devfs within the linux system
There’s occasional video and audio sync problems, but Johannes Hofmann has already found a fix.
Alex Hornung has suggested replacing the existing bugtracker (Roundup) with a new one (Redmine). His post about the changes is lengthy and links to a demo, so read on for details; I haven’t had a chance to look at it in full, yet.