DragonFly BSD Digest

Andreas Hauser has put together a package of the X.org effort.

Since we’re still using the ports system, you can speed installs up significantly by using prebuilt packages. There’s package repositories at Fortunaty.net and GoBSD.com.

Sun is reportedly thinking about open-sourcing Java. There’s no timeline or specific commitment, so it all could be rumors. While Java for FreeBSD works on DragonFly (or so I’ve heard), it’d be nice to have it work officially, without jumping through license hoops.

‘GeekGod’ has also created a libdfui wiki. libdfui is the library being used to build the installer interface.

Thomas Belian made a post to dragonfly.docs asking if a translation of the documentation to German would help. I made a reply that is probably worth repeating:

“It would be nice to have; you may want to wait until the documentation is more “settled”, probably after the 1.0 release. If you’d like to write original documentation, that would help too, and that can be done right
now.

We could use an extended section on networking setup, and a section on ports. If you check out the cvs target ‘doc‘, you can base it off the files there. Specifically, copy one of the chapter.sgml files in a directory under /doc/en/books/userguide/ and start working. If you are unfamiliar with the markup, you can read up on it at http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html“

‘GeekGod’ has placed Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s packaging plan into a wiki.

Discussion of an improved/replaced ‘ports’ system ran on for a bit on dragonfly.kernel, and Eirik Nygaard reposted an important link: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s extensive writeup.

(Watch for subtle hint!) It’s good enough to serve as a task outline for anyone contemplating ports work. (end hint)

Sascha Wildner’s preformatted DragonFly documentation has been cleaned up, and had title pages and content lists added.

Matt Dillon mentioned that he’s considering using apt-get combined with VFS to create a sort of ‘per-user’ port visibility. Quoting his examples:

“So the ‘apache user’ might only have 10 ports installed (and only access to those 10) while a GUI user might have 50 ports installed (and only access to those 50). Overlaps would be allowed… the environments would be considered independant.

Such environments would also enforce basic isolation/separation/security features such as “/usr is read-only except for /usr/local”, and would be stackable, but instead of trying to use them on a per-package basis we would use them on a per-user basis (or something like that).

This gives us the best of both worlds in my view.

This would mean a new ‘port’ system would have to wait until VFS is finished, though using apt-get without the per-user separation would be achieveable almost immediately.

David Rhodus mentioned in his GoBSD journal that DragonFly is a better choice right now than FreeBSD 4.10, highlighting a FreeBSD-4 unfixed bug in his journal. He also let slip that he’s working on a commercial operating system based on DragonFly, with the first release candidate coming very soon.

Rahul Siddharthan pointed at this post as evidence of softupdates not working as quickly as it used to, for FreeBSD and by extension DragonFly. Matt Dillon replied that:

“FreeBSD-5 has a lot overhead, especially when it comes to the buffer manipulation that softupdates does. DFly should be nearly the same as 4.x in regards to FS performance.

There isn’t much I can do about softupdates but the (slowly progressing) namecache work will eventually allow us to release the exclusive lock on the directory vnode during directory searches and this will bring up our lots-of-little-file benchmark numbers considerably.

Another issue that slows down filesystem operations is the busy-page lockout that occurs when the system is writing data to disk and some other operation wants to modify the page undergoing I/O. That is ”on the table’ as well.”

There’s a whole slew of screenshots of the curses interface to the Nympha installer at http://www.livebsd.com/dfly/screenshots/.

Andre Nathan noted that marc.theaimsgroup.com is archiving the dragonfly.bugs, dragonfly.commits, dragonfly.kernel, and dragonfly.submit newsgroups.

Sascha Wildner has placed converted DragonFly man pages at http://www.yoyodyne.de/dfly/doc/

‘GeekGod’ has an alpha version of the DragonFly Live CD with the Nympha installer. Try it out, if you feel lucky – it is alpha, so read the caveats.

Update: now works on VMWare.