Jan Lentfer’s ready to remove BIND from the base system; test out his changes if you’re running a DragonFly-based name server and want to see how it’ll work.
I suspect most people who are interested in BSD or open source in general have the same reaction to the iPad: it’s pretty, it looks neat, and hey Apple wait what do you mean I can’t use it the way I want to? I’ve managed to hold out for a few days on commenting about it, and the benefit is a bit less incoherence.
It’s relevant because it’s a BSD-based device without the normal freedoms you’d associate with it. I’m going to just point at these three articles that do a good job of describing what rubs me the wrong way.
The 4th issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the theme “Hosting BSD“. It’s a free download, and they now have a “questions from users” section that you can write in to.
‘dylanr’ has built 2 interesting films using Gource to visualize DragonFly development; he’s mentioned them in comments here, but I want to make sure people see them.
Update: see the full multi-year film of DragonFly commits linked in the comments by dylanr; thanks for doing this!
Jan Lentfer’s done some new benchmarking of PostgreSQL on Hammer. There’s further suggestions and a more complete benchmark is planned, taking advantage of the Hammer improvements in 2.6. In the meantime, you can look at previous benchmarks.
If you’re a potential Summer of Code student, there’s about 72 hours left in the student application period. Get it in there!
DragonFly 2.6 is out! Download from a mirror, check the release page, and enjoy the large number of new features. There’s a full set of binary packages built, too.
Technically, this is 2.6.1, since 2.6.0 was tagged a week ago and 2.6.1 has all the last minute fixes since then.
Gource is a tool for visualizations from version control history; the video page has some examples. (via) I’d love to see this run on DragonFly. I’m curious to see what would happen on a huge, old repo, like NetBSD. Please hlep me, intarwebs!
pkgsrcCon is happening May 28th-30th in Basel, Switzerland. The event web page has note on location and hotel information. (thanks, S.P.Zeidler)
2.6 will probably be out within the next 24 hours. We’re just waiting on the packages, though we’re probably in the clear already.
Be ready for mild confusion with this and the current Linux kernel. I know it’ll happen.
Daniel Lorch has ported Hammer to Mac OS X, of all things. It’s not complete, but he’s moving right along.
Daniel Lorch’s work on porting Hammer to Linux (read-only, currently) has been moved to a new location.
Newegg is having a big SSD sale; I’m repasting the email with models and prices here. Use it for swapcache! There’s also a promo page with fancy images.
Alex Hornung posted a followup about his I/O scheduler work, with some interesting ways to watch the state of your disk’s activity.
Did you know Linux still had Big Kernel Lock issues? I didn’t. Plus: yay for new KernelTrap activity! Unless this is some sort of April Fools’s prank…
If you’re interested in software design, this blog post may have some good links to follow.
The April Open Source Business Resource is out, on “Cloud Computing”.
Alex Hornung has posted an elaborate summary of his I/O scheduler work, with details on usage. He reports speed improvements under heavy load. If this sounds interesting to you (and it should), it’s possible to test his changes right now.
OpenSSL (which recently hit 1.0, though that’s not in DragonFly yet) has been patched to cover a recent security issue, thanks to Peter Avalos.
Jan Lentfer’s updated BIND to 9.5.2-P3, too.
Venkatesh Srinivas’s new sysctl, “debug.panic” is available for those who want to panic their machine on purpose, but don’t have direct access to the keyboard.
A problem found by Jan Lentfer and fixed by Matthew Dillon means that you can get a good performance boost if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly from the last month or so. Or, you can just wait a week for the 2.6 release.
Alex Hornung has been working on an I/O scheduler; he’s made some graphs to show results so far. They’re plain, but pictures are always fun.