A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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.
DragonFly 2.6 has been branched, and should be released next week. Check the tag message for a list of the many, many commits.
The newest BSDTalk has a 25-minute conversation with Sam Smith, who helped organize EuroBSDCon 2009 and other UKUUG events.
Thanks to work from Samuel J. Greear and Alex Hornung:
There’s occasional video and audio sync problems, but Johannes Hofmann has already found a fix.
This set of graphs that shows relationships within given languages on github shows some interesting relationships, and also happens to be very pretty.
Would it be worth moving DragonFly to github for the additional services? I’m not qualified to answer.
Alex Hornung has suggested replacing the existing bugtracker (Roundup) with a new one (Redmine). His post about the changes is lengthy and links to a demo, so read on for details; I haven’t had a chance to look at it in full, yet.
YONETANI Tomokazu has eliminated cvsup, replacing it with net/csup from pkgsrc. The README notes that the pkgsrc package devel/cvsync is another alternative if you need to retrieve the repository and not just the checked out files..
Matthew Dillon has implemented what he calls “REDO” records in Hammer, which reduce the amount of time taken flushing data to disk. It’ll be in the 2.6 release, but it isn’t on by default.
Jordan Gordeev’s work on 64-bit vkernels has also been brought in, so virtual systems are now available for x86_64 users.
Steven Rosenberg, who I’ve linked to before, is trying BSD again. The linked post is a “story of my install” format.
Matthew Dillon’s added some tools for building system snapshots, a previously custom process. Look at the README for details.
Based on a comment from John Merino on this very Digest, I managed to assemble some statistics on binary pkgsrc package use. See my full post for the details, including some analysis.
Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin posted his work on fan control, involving Winbond Super I/O Hardware Monitors. He’s had a series of commits up to this point, and this message nicely sums up the work done, including the presentations for it at BSDCan last year and AsiaBSDCon this year. Even if you aren’t planning to adjust your system cooling, it’s a surprisingly in-depth writeup, with more details available.
In an effort to catch up…
The next release, 2.6, will be branched in the next few days. The official release: next week, with some last-minute benefits.
The naming convention for the daily snapshots of DragonFly has changed, to make the file names more readable. This may lead to some confusion as the mirrors settle, but it’ll pan out. If you run a mirror, double-check your downloads.