It’s possible to speed up a ‘make buildworld’ by increasing the number of parallel make processes, with the -j option. However, the optimal number of make processes depends on your system setup. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert did some testing, and it looks like the number of CPUs +1 is the best option – as long as you have more than 1 CPU. His writeup even includes a nice graph.
Nuno Antunes has a compact writeup of what it would take to finish porting netgraph7 to DragonFly, if you’re interested…
A bunch of small things to catch up on:
- vim-fugitive: a vim addon that seems to allow git manipulation from within Vim. (via)
- xkcd book 0 is out, for those who like math cartoons. (history cartoons is what gets me.)
- Webfwlog is a firewall log analyzer for various firewall products. It ought to work on DragonFly, too. (via)
Stathis Kamperis has written up a description of the test framework he designed during the Summer of Code. It may end up in DragonFly, which seems like a good idea to me. It’s designed to be generally operating-system independent. He includes a link to the git repo where he’s keeping it now.
Can you think of something that:
- Takes about 4-6 months to do?
- Can be used in DragonFly?
- Is usable as a Computer Science thesis?
Francois Tigeot reports having used vkernels in production quite successfully to isolate some legacy software, even though vkernels were only planned as a development tool. Nice to hear of something being more useful than intended.
Luiz Gustavo made a screencast for the DragonFly installation process. It’s 15 minutes long, requires Flash, and it would probably help if you speak Portuguese. I like seeing videos like these; multiple media always make for more fun.
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Arts and Media as the theme. The article about film production using open-source tools is especially good, as articles like that tend to be a list of application names only, while this article goes into the whys and wherefores.
Sdävtaker has created a new blog, similar in design to this one, at http://dfbsd.trackbsd.org.ar/. It’s in Spanish!
DragonFly 2.4 1 should be out Thursday. There’s a few bugfixes to add, still.
Seen via Richard Bejtlich’s excellent Taosecurity blog: the 6th issue of BSD Magazine is out.
Don’t forget, the first 3 issues (scroll down on that link) are free to download in PDF format.
Yay, another BSDTalk! Will Backman talks about where he’s been for the past month in BSDTalk number 177, and plays back a talk with FreeBSD developer Giorgos Keramidas.
If you’ve got a really, really old DragonFly installation that been upgraded from… 1.8? Perhaps earlier? The system will be using libc_r instead of lib_xu. If you want to change to lib_xu, which is the long-term goal, Hasso Tepper has the simple steps listed.
This Internetnews.com article makes a good point: DragonFly has thrived since splitting from FreeBSD 5+ years ago, and the difference between the systems is more apparent now, with the introduction of DevFS and Hammer.
Some months ago, Nikita Glukhov started working on a port of tmpfs to DragonFly. It’s incomplete, but Alex Hornung has put together a nice summary and is looking for someone to take it up again. I’d sure like to see it active again; it’s much better than mfs.
If you had any trouble with the dramatic changes in the 2.4 page, there’s a page on the DragonFly BSD site that lists possible workarounds.
The dragonflybsd.org site(s) were down due to a network provider problem over the last 24 hours; they’re back now.
Hubert Feyrer posted a link to a set of benchmarks of various BSDs (and Linux) using Ruby. DragonFly, despite not working with a SMP kernel on the test software, had comparatively good results.
I don’t know how recently this recording was made, but Dru Lavigne found a recording of Jeffrey Hsu (longtime DragonFly committer) taking about How To Get Started with Kernel Programming.
It’s alliterative, so it must be good. Brian Gianforcaro has offered to set up Doxygen for DragonFly, which if nothing else would show where more comments were needed.