Jaime Fournier ran a Ruby benchmark against the various BSDs. (noted via IRC and here) DragonFly came out scoring very well. However! I don’t really know what these benchmarks are testing, since I haven’t used Ruby or these tests before. Jaime seems to be planning more tests.
Michael Lucas’s “BSD Needs Books” talk from NYCBSDCon 2010 is online, in video form. I got to see this as it happened, and it was a excellent talk. Mr. Lucas is able to put some reasonable arguments together as to the why of things, since he’s been published multiple times, plus his sense of humor keeps it moving.
Hey, wait – there’s more from the conference on BSD TV! How did I miss this? Hopefully even more will show up; the facility was perfect for recording.
Joe Talbott has some changes for both Intel and non-Intel wifi NICs; please try out his branch and report the results.
Sascha Wildner has changed the default compiler to gcc 4.4. See his commit notes for some details. To my knowledge, we’re the only BSD using this recent a version.
A full buildworld/buildkernel is probably the best strategy. I’ll be rebuilding all the pkgsrc packages for 2.9 using gcc 4.4… This will take at least a week.
I forgot to mention it when I did this opening night, but: DragonFly’s application to Google Summer of Code 2011 is in. We find out if we’re accepted on the 18th.
If you’re curious, I have a bulk build on DragonFly 2.9/x86_64/pkgsrc-current finished. Work on the programs that don’t build is always welcome. It’s pretty good for bleeding-edge, though!
“Co-Creation” is the theme of this month’s Open Source Business Resource, and appropriately enough, it has two editors. This issue has perhaps the most umlauts ever.
… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program. (Often called “pushing patches upstream”) That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project. That tracking down can be a majority of the work. In that case: thanks, Rumko!
Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke! He did the same thing for pcc.
It’s not even released yet, but John Marino and Sascha Wildner have been laying the foundation for using gcc 4.6 in DragonFly. gcc 4.6 looks to have some new things in it; more Objective-C support and Go, too, based on my quick perusal of the gcc website.
“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting. Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year. It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.
Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!
Matthias Scheler is looking for Postfix testers. If you run it, he has a patch to version 2.8.1 he’d like you to try.
Also, the final list of GTK1-using packages that are not actively updated has been determined. These packages are leaving pkgsrc next week unless there’s any last-minute intercessions.
I’ve linked to it before, but it’s expanded since: the Google Summer of Code projects page on dragonflybsd.org has a whole lot of ideas listed. Please add to it, especially if there’s a project you’d like to be doing. (Here’s more thoughts, for example.)
Stéphanie Ouillon expressed interest in the virtio drivers as a Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly; Aggelos Economopoulos followed up with an explanation of the various work that’s been done, and further resources. I chimed in with my usual warning.
Sascha Wildner’s removed the meteor(4) code because it apparently no longer builds, and it’s unlikely anyone uses an actual video board that requires this driver, at this point. If you do, speak up.
Matthew Dillon’s improved bridging to the point where you can now modify the MAC address of the bridge and most everything, including ARP, will come from it correctly. It’s even possible to bond 2 or more interfaces together, with the side effect of dragonflybsd.org having a lot more bandwidth.
Update: the config for his bonded interfaces has been posted as an example.
Update 2: More notes here.
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
Matthew Dillon has continued his bridge work, with another commit adding various features. Go, read.
Venkatesh Srinivas did a comparison of the default scheduler in DragonFly with the “fairqueue” scheduler, using Interbench, the “interactivity benchmark”. The numbers don’t show a deficit relative to either side, which is OK I guess? I’m not sure how to analyze it.
I posted before about a move to use AT&T’s U-Verse fiber/DSL product for dragonflybsd.org’s connection. It led Matt Dillon to try to add features to compensate for the service’s shortcomings, but it’s still problematic. He’s written up just how broken U-Verse is, calling it “almost a complete failure” as a business connection. The bulk of the problems seem to come from the 2Wire DSL modem supplied by AT&T.
Remember when the Internet used to be the place to find long technical writeups of a product directly from people who were using it? Much of that has disappeared into comment forms and ephemeral Facebook posts. That’s too bad.
If you’re like me, you’ve been using XMMS for music playback since just about forever. It’s ancient, though. It uses GTK1, and since Thomas Klausner is trying to get GTK1 dependencies out of pkgsrc, he listed a roundup of alternatives on the pkgsrc-users mailing list, most/all of which are in pkgsrc. Pouya Tafti added some more.