Goings-on – Page 64 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/03/012010/03/02

Self-hosting clang; building DragonFly with it too

clang, which many people look to as a gcc replacement, is now able to build itself. (Thanks John Marino for the heads-up, some time ago) It can also build world and kernel on DragonFly, going on the work of Sascha Wildner!

Using the pkgsrc package, put

clang_CC=/usr/pkg/bin/clang

in /etc/compilers.conf and then set $CCVER to “clang” when building:

env WORLD_CCVER=clang make -DNO_GCC44 buildworld

I haven’t tried this, so any errors in description are mine, not Sascha’s – can someone verify? I don’t have a test system to run it on right now.

Edit: see Sascha’s comment for the definitive method.

2010/03/01

Messylaneous for 2010/03/01

I think I’ve almost caught up on my backlog of Things To Post:

The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is up, with the theme of “Mobile”. The BeagleBoard and OpenBTS articles are going to appeal to some specific people.

More links from Dru Lavigne.

“It’s sinking in that Sun is gone“, the vi Complete Key Binding List, and Post-quantum cryptography, all ganked from Trivium.

2010/02/28

OpenSSL update

OpenSSL version 0.9.8m has been imported by Peter Avalos; this version contains a bugfix for a security issue.

2010/02/28

Obligatory iPad mention

The iPad is BSD-based, which is neat. I like the notion of covering more BSD devices and products here on the Digest.

But: do you like even the vague concept of open source? The iPad is expressly designed to limit your choices, especially with media consumption and the programs you run. It’s sort of like owning a TV circa 1975 – you get what large media groups and the network (Apple) want you to see. I don’t want to come across as someone who’s complaining because it’s different – I’m complaining because it’s not different.

There’s other people arguing the same idea, with even more reasons. This is one of the most specific. Plus, there’s the natural progression…

2010/02/26

(b)make install change in pkgsrc

Joerg Sonnenberger announced new behavior in pkgsrc: Performing “bmake install” in pkgsrc with a package that supports DESTDIR will build a binary package and then install from that package. This means a package will be successfully build before the installation process is started, and I assume is to assist further work down the road.

Details: The old behavior was to build and install directly, which “bmake stage-install” can reproduce. DESTDIR support means that the software can be installed as non-root.

2010/02/262010/02/26

Works in progress: wifi, unionfs

There’s several projects in the works:

Rui Paulo is working on an update of wireless device support in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon added libbsdxml to DragonFly as part of the prep work.
Joe Talbott is working on unionfs; Nicolas Thery supplied some links, while Matthew Dillon wants deduplication.

2010/02/25

More SSD deals

For those wanting to try swapcache(8): Newegg has two deals running: a Corsair P128 128GB SATA II SSD for $355 and a Patriot PS-100 2.5″ 64GB SATA I/II SSD for $170. These are probably bigger than what’s needed for using swapcache, but if you’re itching to spend…

2010/02/24

New committer: Samuel J. Greear

Welcome Samuel J. Greear as the newest DragonFly committer; he’s been around the project for a while, but recently became more active.

2010/02/23

Swapcache better than expected

As part of a report on the status of swapcache and tmpfs, Matthew Dillon noted that a side effect of using a SSD for swapcache means that disk activity stays efficient, and the wear meter on the SSD is reduced much more slowly than for regular disk use.

2010/02/21

Get ready for 2.6

The next release, 2.6, is scheduled for mid-March. Please make sure things are running well, as there’s a lot of new features already ready for this release.

2010/02/19

Dear lazyweb: monitoring software needed

Since I have several machines repeatedly building all of pkgsrc now, I want to monitor RAM, disk I/O, CPU, and the like, and keep historical records. I’ve seen this done with cacti and snmp, and sort of done with nagios.

There must be easier/prettier choices out there. Any suggestions?

2010/02/19

Dragonfly and BSD but not this

It’s that Opera thing again. “Sigh“.

2010/02/18

Teaching down south

‘Sdävtaker’ posted a call for course proposals, for the ECI 2010 conference happening the last week of July at Buenos Aires University. Proposals are due by March 12th, and Portugese, Spanish, or English are all acceptable.

2010/02/18

Google Summer of Code presentation templates

If you need to talk about/sell the Google Summer of Code idea to people, Google now has a set of templates for GSOC presentations. Use them to drum up interest, or persuade someone to mentor/be a student.

2010/02/14

New committer: Constantine A. Murenin

Welcome DragonFly’s newest committer: Constantine A. Murenin. He’s responsible for the sensors framework, and is already busy.

2010/02/12

Default PostgreSQL and Python changes

Postgres will be 8.4, and Python 2.6, as default installs from pkgsrc. This affects anyone following pkgsrc-current, but if you are using pkgsrc-2009Q4, it won’t matter for a few months yet.

2010/02/12

A BSD cartoon

Brought to you by iXsystems: a BSD-themed cartoon. We haven’t had one since the one that ran on bsdnews.com… 5 years ago? (via) Updates each Friday.

2010/02/09

Outage Wednesday

Most of the dragonflybsd.org machines will be down for a short period Wednesday; this is for an upgrade that includes an SSD for the recent swapcache work. Everyone should notice a speedup, since while crater.dragonflybsd.org is getting the SSD/swapcache, a lot of crater’s directories are mounted on other machines via NFS.

2010/02/082010/02/08

A week’s worth of posts for you

I can’t keep up with all the things to post. I desperately want to clear my inbox, so here’s a week’s worth of posts all smushed together. Enjoy!

Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs work is almost ready to go.
Francois Tigeot is looking to find supported RAID hardware for DragonFly; the LSI1068e isn’t useable. Freddie Cash listed a number of different and fully supported cards, and Francois listed some other potential choices.
While talking about hardware, Steve O’Hara-Smith reported excellent results with a particular Atom 330-based board and DragonFly.
Stathis Kamperis has added to ‘hammer snapls’ output; an example is in his submit@message.
The 2.6 release of DragonFly, scheduled for March, will have version 4 of HAMMER. 2.4 has version 2. Upgrading from version 2 to 4 can happen in place, live, and only needs to happen once per volume, not per PFS. That’s about as easy as it gets. More details are available.
The default sshd config has been updated; this shouldn’t affect your normal operations unless you’re using one of the mentioned options.
Oliver Fromme linked to more discussion of SSD durability.
Also, Matthew Dillon posted more notes and benchmark numbers for his swapcache work. There’s been some side benefits too. A man page for swapcache is now available.
Aggelos Economopoulos’s libevtr has been added, for event tracing. He’s posted some additional notes on this work-in-progress.
We now have /var/log/daemon, too.
Notes on prepping for Google Summer of Code 2010 from the GSOC Discussion list; I don’t know if that link is readable for nonsubscribers.
The Definitive Guide to PC-BSD is out at the end of this short month. Dru writes good books.
Did you know FreeCiv (a Civilization clone, of sorts) is playable in a web browser? Goodbye free time! Details are available at my favoritest game site.

Phew.

2010/02/05

BSDTalk 185: James Nixon and PC-BSD

James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.