Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented another networking speedup. Read the commit message for details on what he changed, since it’s rather in-depth. He shows an 18% improvement in netperf results.
Matthew Dillon has written a contiguous memory mapper, which is designed to fix problems with video cards and USB drives that need a big chunk of memory to keep. This can affect booting or later on, when disconnecting/reconnecting a USB drive. If this still doesn’t fix the problem for you, try adjusting the sysctl ‘vm.dma_reserved’ to something bigger, like 64M. It defaults to 16M.
(Normal mailarchive isn’t updating because of an ongoing upgrade to crater.dragonflybsd.org – sorry!)
When building world and kernel on DragonFly, /usr/obj is where the work files get placed. This can eat a bit of space, but it can be safely deleted. If you keep the files around, subsequent rebuilds can be done faster with a quickwork/quickkernel, but this may not matter to you.
(This was answered on the mailing lists by Max Herrgaard, but I don’t have a link to his reply – sorry!)
Hey, the date’s sorta palindromic! Sorta.
- “Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors” – a video description of the physical parts of the Internet. Remember when MAE-East or MAE-West would have a bad day and half the Internet felt it? Really, half. I don’t think I’m exaggerating. (via)
- Google has a verbatim search mode now, for those of you who regret the loss of ‘+’ as a required search term designator. (via and also sort of via) There’s always alternatives.
- “The expr program is a real piece of crap.” Laser-focused complaining about a small program that’s had 4 decades to improve, and hasn’t.
- “Mechanics for Pure Aesthetics” The videos are interesting, and I’m linking to this because so much of what I post here and deal with is focused computer work. Everything is a tool, with a purpose, and a result that you expect. This idea of machinery or even software having a purpose other than result generation is underexplored. There’s lots of tools to create art, but there’s little that is art itself. Even with that general lack, we still get excited when the edge of some sort of aesthetic appeal nudges its way into the materials we use. You could argue that Apple’s success (for instance) comes from being the one company that consistently thinks about what a product is, instead of what it does.
- If you use fastcgi, you may need the patch that this blog post talks about. Also, apache-mpm-prefork is the better choice for Apache on DragonFly.
- “DragonFly mug shot“
Your random comic link of the day: Calamity of Challenge. Also here. And here. If this artist’s way of drawing grabs you like it grabs me, he has pages and commissions for sale.
Remember the Postgres benchmark I described here a few days ago? Francois Tigeot has updated it with numbers from Scientific Linux running the same pgbench procedure. (see page 2) If you’re too lazy to look at the PDF, his summary is this: Linux is fastest of all, and also crashes the most.
Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented an asynchronous pru_send in sendfile. The results are a 70-90% increase in performance, as shown in his netperf localhost test.
DragonFly now uses Redmine for bugs.dragonflybsd.org. This means that the bugs@ and submit@ lists have can still be read by anyone, but to post a new bug or patch, or reply, you need to be registered on the bug tracker itself. You don’t have to be subscribed to the mailing list to use the web interface. See the bugs@ and submit@ announcements for other details.
The man page for dfregress has been put together, and you can read it and find out how to contribute, right now.
(That man page should be up by the time this is posted…)
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado has been working with clang and DragonFly, along with Sascha Wildner. DragonFly mostly compiles using clang, with lib/citrus being (the only? one of?) the last holdouts. Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado detailed how to test it out using clang 3.0 in case someone else wants to help solve this.
If you’re tracking DragonFly current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update. Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes in route(8) that a quickworld will not catch.
The two things that make my day! The work on DragonFly-current has led to some significant speed improvements. So good, that Samuel Greear’s post on OSNews.org links to graphed results from him and from Francois Tigeot (multi-page PDF) showing the results from pgbench.
The results show a jump in multi-core/processor numbers that vastly exceeds DragonFly 2.10’s performance, and is comparable to FreeBSD 9/10. Here’s some of what did it.
Alex Hornung has created ‘dfregress’, a test framework designed to be as simple as possible for adding tests to DragonFly. This would make it easier to verify an upcoming release is correct, for instance. See his commit note for extensive details, and add a trivial test for anything you value.
This is another one of those features that I bet goes away, and nobody would notice because nobody uses it any more. Sascha Wildner has removed AppleTalk from DragonFly.
The host leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been upgraded to new hardware. This is the machine used for anyone who wants to develop on DragonFly, so there’s a good performance boost there for developers. It also hosts bugs.dragonflybsd.org, which should be working again soon.
DragonFly has a new memory allocator, called (not surprisingly) “dmalloc“. It’s only present on x86_64, not i386, because it could eat up more VSZ (virtual memory) than an i386 kernel may have available.
I’m going for more verbose linking. Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it? If not – too late!
- NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, And Why You Should Care“. He was one of the more colorful speakers at NYCBSDCon 2010, so this should be good.
- It’s Slashdot, so whatever, but this “In Favor of FreeBSD On the Desktop” linked story had a few good comments – BSD hasn’t done enough to differentiate itself from Linux. “BSD: In Need of a Narrative“. Or perhaps, “Who cares if it’s clang or it’s gcc – what do you build with it?“
- I read this essay about social networks (via), and the last paragraph is an excellent summation. Read it, then cancel your Facebook/Google Plus/whatever accounts.
- Xv6 is a modern version of Sixth Edition UNIX, used at MIT for teaching operating system design. (via) The source is available via git, and as a numbered PDF. The book for the class should make interesting reading. Oh, you can see the class details, too.
- FOSDEM 2012 in Brussels, February 5th, 09:00 – 17:00: “Open Source Game Dev”. Get on the mailing list if this interests you. Microsoft operating systems still rule the market for games, really, even indie work, so it’s neat to see something that is both open source and game oriented. There will be BSD “devrooms” there, too.
- If you are looking for a particular Unicode character (and there’s lots to choose from), Shapecatcher lets you draw what you are looking for and looks for matches. (via) I’ve needed that here a few times for people’s names, and it’s fun just to see what comes up from a random scribble.
Your unrelated link of the week: The New Shelton Wet/Dry. Titles, content, and images are all picked from unrelated sources, but it forms an oddly compelling digest of multiple topics. Slightly NSFW, sometimes.
The presence of /usr/include/crypt.h in DragonFly (starting in December 2010) meant that some programs compiled during that time will expect that file to always be there. It was recently removed, so any programs compiled in that timeframe will also need to be recompiled. Right now, this affects you only if you are running DragonFly 2.13 , since that’s the only place crypt.h was removed. This may be an issue for the release, but we’ll worry about that when we get there… I’m kicking off new 2.13 bulk builds now.
There’s a new page up on the DragonFly website, about using rpkgmanager to manage your pkgsrc-installed packages.
In DragonFly, there’s only a few places C++ is used. If you wanted to make sure DragonFly was pure C, Samuel Greear lists those remaining nooks and crannies.
Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now… except these last 31. I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after. Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.