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.
In an effort to catch up…
- Matthew Dillon made a change to how material in memory is paged out; it may improve things depending on how much paging your system already does.
- The AsiaBSDCon OpenBSD papers are online, with mention of video of the presentations.
- Use keys for your SSH login, cause this will only get worse.
- Ten Shell One-liners. The first one, using your favorite editor on the command line, is one of those things I knew about, but didn’t know to do. (caveat: some Linuxisms)
- Want to test a big xorg update for pkgsrc? Of course you do.
The next release, 2.6, will be branched in the next few days. The official release: next week, with some last-minute benefits.
The naming convention for the daily snapshots of DragonFly has changed, to make the file names more readable. This may lead to some confusion as the mirrors settle, but it’ll pan out. If you run a mirror, double-check your downloads.
Stephane Russel was having trouble printing with OpenOffice and lpr on DragonFly. He fixed it, and I’m linking to his explanation because someday, someone will have the same problem and be looking for the solution…
Alex Hornung is working on a new version of the Handbook; my hat is off to him. I brought along the FreeBSD handbook SGML to DragonFly, and converted it through to the current wiki, so I know just how much there is. Check RecentChanges for the new work, and join in if you like.
There’s a lot to read, so if you understand it, that’s great. I’m passing it on without other comment.