Benchmarks benchmarks benchmarks

Benchmarks would be good. I bring this up because Hubert Feyrer has a post about various NetBSD happenings, which includes some interesting benchmark work. It doesn’t include DragonFly, but it’s a good model from which to work. Notice the hint there? Was it too subtle?

Most of the benchmarking work these days seems to focus on multi-cpu scalability… I would like to just see comparative numbers, especially since there’s still plenty of single-cpu systems around.

Moving backwards to improve

Undeadly.org has an interesting article about sticking to base applications. It’s all about making the programs that come in the base system install work instead of needing to install third-party packages to get a comfortable work environment.

It’s OpenBSD specific, but it is generally applicable to any system with a base set of included tools, which generally means all BSDs. The comments have some interesting parts, too, like using a source control system to synchronize dotfiles across multiple systems. (just having one consistent .vimrc would make me happy)

Sensors roundup

KernelTrap has a very nice summation of Constantine Murenin’s BSDCan 2008 talk about the OpenBSD sensors framework. This framework is in DragonFly now. It was also in and then out of FreeBSD; the KernelTrap article (in addition to describing how the actual code works) covers some of the conversation between Poul Henning-Kamp and Constantine Murenin at the BSDCan event about why that happened with FreeBSD.

Updated again: description changed, at Constantine’s request.

Google Summer of Code catchup

Max Lindner posted a summary of his SoC plans for enhancing dma this summer, and he’s looking for feedback.

Louisa Luciani is looking for more discussion on her LiveDVD project; specifically, what kind of environment to create. She’s already collated previous suggestions on the wiki.

Robert Luciani (yes, they’re related) recently finished a school project evaluating threading on DragonFly; his poster and paper (PDF) are available. Appropriately,he’s working on multiprocessing support.

(typos fixed – thanks, smtms on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

New vkernel abilities

Vkernels on leaf.dragonflybsd.org are now able to locally network; if you are a Google Summer of Code student that needs that functionality, tell Matthew Dillon and he will put you in the right group.

In addition, he’s created a new tool called vknetd, which enables network creation in userland. This is intended for userland applications like vkernels, though there seems to be some capability for a SSH-based VPN? Someone correct me – or better yet, try it out.

Links for 8/27

I have a number of small things, mostly old-school games, to post, so I’ll break out the bullets: