A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The default linker in DragonFly has been switched to gold, the newer version of ld. (get it, go-ld?) It’s faster, cleaner, going by the commit message. It’s possible to switch back to the old one if needed. This predates the recent branch for 4.4, so it will be default in the release, too.
The next release of DragonFly is coming due, since it’s been 6 months. I just tagged 4.4RC, and I’ll have an image built soon. Current estimate is that we’ll have the 4.4-RELEASE at the end of the month.
This is one of those weeks where everything gets covered. Settle in, there’s lots to click.
Your eighties video link for the week: The 80s.mp4. (via)
Your unrelated browser toy of the week: A browser-based optics sandbox. (via)
Another week where there’s so much to link to, it overflows into next week.
Imre Vadász fixed top so that hitting ‘c’ filters displayed processes by command name. I am mentioning this not because it’s a huge change, but because I forget about all the interactive elements that are possible with top.
Does that count as alliteration? Anyway, Matthew Dillon has increased the size of the starting window in TCP. If you are on a higher-latency link and/or fetching lots of small files, you should notice better performance.
This week’s BSDNow has the usual news, plus an interview of George Wilson talking about ZFS. There’s a new Beastie Bits section that contains a bunch of short links to BSD material… Hey! That’s my niche!
If you are on bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3), you will need to rebuild both kernel and world to keep them in sync, after Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit. This won’t affect you at all if you are on 4.2.x.
I don’t think I linked to this anywhere else: Why did I choose the DragonFlyBSD Operating System? By Siju George, at BSD Magazine.
The disk scheduler apparatus in DragonFly has been removed. This may not affect you much, since alternate scheduling setups were never utilized much with it. It may fix some rare Hammer cleanup issues, though, and you may need to adjust your custom kernel config, if you have one.
Reminder: Stephen Bourne, known for the Bourne Shell, among many other things, will be talking at NYCBUG this Thursday. Plan to get there early, cause it’ll be busy.
If you are anywhere near Detroit, the inaugural SEMIBUG meeting is the night of the 17th – that’s tomorrow, as of this posting. Go, visit, and I’ll be jealous since there’s no BSD user groups near me.
It might snow around here today, and I am looking forward to it.
This is the sort of BSD link week I like, with lots of range and depth.
John Marino sent a helpful link to show the cross-platform work he’s been involved in: He brought the locale work from Illumos into DragonFly over the summer (look for his name on commits), and now it has been brought from DragonFly into FreeBSD, with Baptiste Daroussin reporting on the process. If there’s any OpenBSD/NetBSD developers reading, with an interest in locales, this may be useful..
(someone correct me if that’s not the right Illumos link)
It’s Thursday and there’s a new BSDNow: Controlling the Transmissions. The interview this week is with Hiren Panchasara, about “improving TCP”, though I haven’t yet listened to it for details. There’s also the normal news roundup.
If you are using bleeding-edge DragonFly (4.3) on a machine with Intel video, the i915 module has been renamed. This means you will probably need to rebuild xf86-video-intel from source to have it match. There should be a matching binary package soon.
If you are on DragonFly 4.2, this does not affect you.
Sascha Wildner has brought over support for the Realtek 8168H. This may be useful because at least one low-cost server provider – Kimsufi, I think? – uses them by default in their product line.
If you are using clang with DragonFly, and you want to always run the newest version, you can set options in compilers.conf, and use ‘clangnext‘.