Saifi Khan ran Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s make parallelism test on a dual-cpu system, and the theory holds up: ‘make -j N’ where N == the number of CPUs, plus 1, will give the fastest build time. (graphed again!)
If you use any sort of BSD product at work, the BSD Certification group wants you to take a survey. They are building a cross section of what people are doing with BSD, and this will show what requirements should go with the certifications. Any BSD use applies, not just DragonFly. The more results, the better the tests, and the more value to the certifications, so we all benefit.
Do you have a SMP system, running DragonFly 2.5? Stathis Kamperis needs you to test something, to see if another set of system calls can be made multiprocessor-safe.
Update: An additional step.
If you’ve previously had problems in DragonFly with AHCI and a DVD drive, there’s a potential fix available.
The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)
The pkgsrc packages ghostscript6 and ghostscript-esp are probably going to be removed. Do `pkg_info | grep ghostscript` to see if this affects you.
Any readers involved with Python source? There’s two extant Python patches that Hasso Tepper put together for Python 2.5 and 2.4, languishing.
On a more positive note, an upstream fix for Perl was added promptly.
BSDTalk 178 is all about Evil! Well, Internet evil. It’s an hour-plus-long conversation wtih Richard Clayton at EuroBSDCon about phishing, spamming, and other things that didn’t have a name a few decades ago.
The next theme for the Open Source Business Resource was to be “co-creation”, focusing on commercial companies and relationships with open source development. There were so many articles that it’s now covering 2 months.
It’ll be sporadic.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has updated gcc 4.4 to version 4.4.2 (not used by default), and binutils to version 2.2.0.
I’m suddenly having trouble with the machine that hosts this site (random crashes, hardware disappearing), so there may be some surprise downtime over the next few days until a replacement motherboard arrives…
dragonflybsd.org will be going down for work somewhere in the next two weeks. The package archive at avalon.dragonflybsd.org is located elsewhere, so pkg_radd and similar programs will still work.
Sascha Wildner has added mandoc(1), an OpenBSD product. I like the HTML output. (I’ve said it before, come to think of it.)
Alexander Polakov is putting together an update for the complex beast that is ACPI, but he has two questions that need an answer, about locking and APICs. Please help if you know something about it, as an up-to-date ACPI helps everyone.
I’ll indulge myself in a bit of roguelike enjoyment: the @Play column is targeting roguelike equipment types, starting with Potions and Scrolls. Loot!
Hubert Feyrer posted a note about time zones, describing how to find what’s defined on a system (all his steps work on DragonFly) and tricks to set it locally. Along the same lines is this “A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database” that talks about all the historical details. (via) Of course, I have to mention Sascha Wildner, who has been carefully keeping DragonFly’s time zone data up to date for quite a while.
Update: and again!
Matthew Dillon went to the Google Summer of Code Mentor’s Conference at Google’s offices in California, and took some pictures. It’s all available on Flickr. He was the only DragonFly attendee, but check to see what developers on other open-source projects look like in person. There’s even the not-related-to-me Joel Sherrill (on the left).
If you’re going to the CCC, there’s several DragonFly people going, and they are working to rent an apartment for the several days of the event. Follow up with Matthias if you’re going too.