If you wanted to rebuild all your already-installed pkgsrc software, this post on pkgsrc-users@ describes the way to do it using pkg_rolling-replace. This can be useful if you want to try a new threading library, for instance.
‘Haidut’ benchmarked several different systems using a vanilla install, and posted the results at his website. (Scroll down) Interestingly, the DragonFly results are quite competitive, especially considering that it’s in a massive transition.
I’ve posted about it before, but the question returns: how does one install modular Xorg from pkgsrc when there’s no single meta-pkg for it? Gergo Szakal links to some answers.
Matthew Dillon has committed a huge update to the system initalization code, which, among other things, allows parallel processes during boot. This means that system initialization can be greatly sped up, which he plans to have working by Monday. (and is already starting on it!)
(Reminds me of my old BeOS/PPC system – a desktop within 10 seconds.)
Matthew Dillon has synchronized the Preview version of DragonFly with the bleeding edge code, since his commit of the SYSREF system may cause some stability problems. The first commit incidentally fixes some other issues he found.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.1.9.
Matthew Dillon posted an update on how he’s organizing syslink to handle the sharing of machine resources in a cluster.
It is possible to use multiple make processes when building from pkgsrc, similar to using -j when performing buildworld to speed things up. It can be set in mk.conf or as an environment variable, and turned off for specific packages if it causes trouble.
Joerg Sonnenberger has binary packages of the 2007Q1 pkgsrc release now available on his server.
Aggelos Economopoulos’s second article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel is now available to non-subscribers on lwn.net. (The first article is also available.)
Welcome our newest committer: Hasso Tepper. In addition to his recently committed patched for DragonFly, he’s also been working on KDE support for DragonFly.
rsync.net (which offers Backup Done Right, as far as I can tell) is offering a number of code bounties for various (mostly FreeBSD) projects. One of them is a standardized stress test for UFS2 – a general filesystem testing framework would do everyone good – especially someone using a distributed file system…
The PHP and PEAR packages in pkgsrc are being decoupled from each other, for ease of maintenance.
When we say DragonFly is a modern BSD, we mean it in every way. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert taught morse(6) to produce actual sounds and allow them to be saved to a file, among other things.
There’s a variety of ways to turn on multiprocessing support in a kernel; Matthew Dillon recently explained the variety and reasoning.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has pointed out that pkg_rolling-replace is very helpful when recompiling to use a different threading library.
Peter Avalos has updated tnftp to the latest version.
I’m a bit slow in mentioning this, but: the most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2007Q1, is officially released.
Do you have a bge(4) network card? If so, Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to test his patch – it shouldn’t do anything but improve the card performance.
A very busy week on UnixReview.com: the oddly-titled Regular Expressions column “Tuple Spaces Help Organize Concurrency Solutions“, and Shell Corner’s “Perl Is a Gem: One-Liners and Programs“. There’s also an article called “The Joys of Data Classification“, along with book reviews of “UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition“, and “Backup and Recovery“.