A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you’re trying DragonFly 3 in a virtual machine, you may have noticed some issues in booting in (for instance) Qemu. Sepherosa Ziehau committed a change that sets the sysctl hw.ioapic_enable to 0 in virtual environments. It can always be turned back on, but the recent MSI/MSI-X improvements seem to cause trouble in some virtual environment. You can also set that tunable at boot to get an initial install going.
(I haven’t had trouble in Virtualbox or VMWare, so you may or may not need this.)
As several people have told me, there’s benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 vs. 2.10, available on Phoronix. CPU performance shows a significant improvement, in tests that actually test it. (I’d think a file compression test would be disk-limited, for instance.) Disk performance isn’t as great, but that may be in part because Hammer no longer will starve reading to benefit writing; that makes benchmarks look worse but improves real-world interactivity. I’m sure there’s more quibbling to do, since it’s lies, damn lies benchmarks.
If for some reason you needed DragonFly 2.6 ISOs, or older, there’s a mirror.
It’s now possible to specify a jail ID when using pgrep and pkill(1), to capture processes specific to a jail. It’s similar to the same option in FreeBSD, except no compatibility issues since this option did not previously exist in DragonFly.
If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.
This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text. I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute. Thanks, Internet! It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.
Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!
I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:
“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it. I don’t know if it still applies.
Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.
Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs. Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.
If you’re in New York City or the UK, there’s two new DragonFly mirrors for your downloading pleasure. Check the mirrors page for details.
Matthew Dillon’s CPU bug hunt has scattered its way across various news sites, some more accurate than others. He’s posted a followup that is probably a more valuable read than any of the news reports.
Have you ever tried to run a service and realized you forgot to make an entry in rc.conf to enable it? It’s mildly annoying. There’s now a “one’ keyword (via NetBSD) that lets you enable a service, once. It still apparently performs sanity checks, unlike the otherwise-similar ‘force’ keyword.
The March issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as always. It’s a real grab-bag of topics this time, so there should be something to interest you. This time, it might be an article on DragonFly and Beowulf clusters. (I was totally not expecting that.)
A few days ago, I posted about Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 leaving pkgsrc – it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer, at least for the 2.5 version. This means the Zope packages will be gone too, since they depend on Python 2.4. This won’t affect you if you aren’t using these packages, of course.
Notice how the 2.12 release never really happened, and 3.0 came out about 6 months later than usual? A lot of that delay was caused by a vigorous search for a weird bug. Multi-threaded buildworlds would crash, seemingly randomly and rarely. It turns out we have confirmation from AMD that it is, indeed, a CPU hardware bug.
The organization application for DragonFly is in for Google Summer of Code. If you are thinking of working as a mentor or as a student, please let me know soon! We will know if we’re accepted (for the 5th time!) on the 16th.
Whee!
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Friends With Boys. The whole comic is available online starting with the first page here and going on for about 200 more. The full comic is only going to be online for a few days – hopefully enough for people to see it – and then you have to buy it. (There will still be a preview.) It’s a good story.
If you said “Yes!”, you’re in luck. Markus Pfeiffer got ghc to compile on DragonFly, and his fixes (for DragonFly at least) to enable it are already committed.
I’ve seen notices in the past 24 hours for 2 different BSD events: BSD-Day, at UAS Technikum Wien in Vienna, Austria on May 5, 2012, and EuroBSDcon 2012, in Warsaw, Poland, October 18-21. The Call For Proposals is out for EuroBSDcon, for submission by May 20th.
The default version of Python in pkgsrc is going to become 2.7. This will mean the 2012Q1 release will use that version by default. Older versions, meaning Python 2.4 and 2.5, may be going away. At least, that’s how the linked thread started but I’m not totally sure about it as I read farther through.
Here’s an interesting side effect that came up in Hammer 2 development: deleting files can potentially require modification of only one parent element. If I’m reading it right, that means deletion always takes about the same time, independent of the amount of data being deleted. Your ‘rm -rf /largedrive’ could complete, removing multiple terabytes of data before you realize it. I suppose it’s silly to complain about speedy results. Of course, being Hammer, it would still be available in history.
