In addition to committing the new scheduler improvements mentioned earlier this week, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to how DragonFly handles low memory situations, so the system will be able to recover much more quickly. He’s also asking for testers of his new vm.burst_fault sysctl.
Hasso Tepper added OpenPAM as a vendor branch in DragonFly’s git repository, and wrote up some notes, including the tip for .git/config:
[core] whitespace = -trailing-space, -space-before-tab Which I've already needed.
Papers for USENIX 2009 are due January 9th, which isn’t very far off, what with the holiday season. So get cracking!
Jason Dixon announced that DCBSDCon registration is open now. Also, they’ve announced Kirk McKusick, Henning Brauer, and Chris Buechler as speakers, with more people announced every Monday and Thursday until the Big Event. (That’s a lot of people…)
Does this XKCD comic ring true for anyone else? In my case, it was my last 2 years of undergraduate school, not 11th grade, but still. Blame open source software and its ability to provide a framework for contribution.
Related: The End of Credentials (via)
Are you going to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, at the end of this year? Let other DragonFly people know, as they’ll be there too.
Hasso Tepper noticed that the scheduler performance on his DragonFly desktop was poor. Interactivity went way down whenever he had multiple intensive processes running, like building software while browsing the web.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to have greatly improved responsiveness; there’s even more explanation available.
If you wanted some hacked pkgsrc packages of Mesa and xorg-server, so that you could try out Hasso Tepper’s DRM patch, well, Steve O’Hara-Smith has you covered.
This cartoon from XKCD is very entertaining.
It looks like Jost Tobias Springenberg is planning to revamp DragonFly’s fdisk, which will be much appreciated.
Hasso Tepper has posted his “personal pkgsrc FAQ” – touching on some of the issues around pkgsrc on DragonFly, and pointing out pretty clearly that pkgsrc binary builds need some support, which is partially my fault.
Dmitry Komissaroff has a patch that will get DragonFly booting with ACPI on an Asus Eee 701, though just why hasn’t been figured out yet.
Update: new patch
I’ve finished a bulk build of pkgsrc package binaries for pkgsrc-current and DragonFly 2.0.1, which is on pkgbox now, and should be available on mirrors soon. Hasso Tepper completed a similar and slightly more successful build.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent change to libpcap means that dumps of network traffic taken before this change won’t be readable with libpcap after this change. Unlikely to affect anyone unless you are both dumping a lot of data off the network and updating your system rapidly, but worth mentioning.
This is not really part of DragonFly, but it will be interesting for some people. Matthew Dillon’s updated his personal investment notes to focus on the recent credit upheaval.
Sepeherosa Ziehau has a patch for carp(4) users; it apparently removes some unneeded complexity.
Testing software upgrade for this blog; pay no attention.
Fluff for the article: Dear Santa Claus: buy me this flash storage. Most older men buy a sports car for their midlife crisis; geeks buy overpowered computer hardware.
The FreeBSD Foundation has 66% of the money they need to raise for the year; chip in, if you can. It gets you a tax break (at least in the U.S.) and they do good work.
Hiroki Sato has posted a reminder: the deadline for AsiaBSDCon 2009 paper submission is December 20th.