Chris Pressey committed the last stage of Andre Nathan’s gigantic K&R -> ANSI cleanup of source. 21 stages, in all.
The latest dev numbering changes from Matt Dillon will break the NVIDIA binary driver, if you are using it. Emiel Kollof is working on a new version, and until that’s set, avoid updating if you want to keep your NVIDIA driver working.
cvs is now at version 1.12.8, updated by Matt Dillon.
Mark Miller has updated the DragonFly Wikipedia entry to include information on serializing tokens.
The network connection to dragonflybsd.org appears to be down – nntp is not accessible, and the website isn’t either.
Update: It’s back online.
I’ve committed a partial section on installation in docs, which – if we’re lucky – will be completely superseded by a DragonFly installer program.
Joerg Sonnenberger has updated the bktr(4) driver to match what’s current in FreeBSD, including a new msp driver (from Linux), and support for the Terratec TValue, which was submitted by Patrick Mauritz.
cc3 has been switched back to stabs output, temporarily until DWARF2 support comes into gdb5 or DragonFly gets gdb6.
Matt Dillon’s procured an initial patch moving the device system to a reference-count mode, plus other things detailed in his lengthy post, which I’ve copied in below.
Continue reading “Reference-count devices”
Brock Johnson submitted and Eirik Nygaard committed version 3.8.3 of tcpdumpand 0.8.3 of libpcap
Chris Pressey wrote down how to fake a hard drive as a ‘live CD’.
A new ‘known stable’ ISO is on the Download page. This one should hopefully be free of the wierd filesystem corruption bug that’s been hitting people.
Matt Dillon’s tracked down a nasty filesystem corruption bug in the lockf code; everyone should update, rebuild, reboot, and do a fsck to make sure your disk is intact.
‘Gabor MICSKO’ has written up the current DragonFly installation process in Hungarian, with screenshots, even.
Jeroen Ruigrok tried using ‘CPUTYPE=p4’ in make.conf as an option to gcc. The resulting kernel crashed; and several people pointed out that the CPUTYPE optimization does not work – especially with gcc 2.x. Matt Dillon went on further to explain how little it helps:
“Trying to use cpu-specific optimizations in 2.95.x is roughly equivalent to a blind man driving an 18 wheeler down the highway. In other words: “don’t do it, it doesn’t work”. GCC2 is known to produce bad code not only with CPUTYPE, but also with higher optimization levels like -O2. Blame the GCC folks for this.
GCC3 does a better job but even so I would not use CPUTYPE without being prepared to turn it off when something breaks, and at best I might use -O2 or -Os (under GCC3 only, and even then we don’t really officially support it, since differentiating between compiler code generation bugs and DFly bugs is extremely difficult).
Besides, you won’t notice any improvement in kernel performance.”
‘walt’ found and Chris Pressey fixed a bug in the port system that could cause some ports to fail building with a error similar to ‘cd: can't cd to &&‘. Extraneous text was being inserted by the ‘build-depends-list’ and ‘run-depends-list’ targets.
A number of people have noticed problems with sendfile(2); especially with Apache. Jeffrey Hsu’s fixed it already.
Matt Dillon posted more ideas on how the DragonFly releases were to go. Specifically, different versions would be coded by slip tags instead of the branches that go on with FreeBSD:
“releaseX_Y: Specific official release, build and regression tested, including security fixes. A sub-sub version (Z) would be embedded in the uname to differentiate between updates to a release, but not be incorporated into the tag name.
release: Current official release.
developer: Developers who want to be cutting edge but still be ‘reasonably’ stable, with occassional glitches.
HEAD: Absolute latest work, might have build and other issues.
Not being branches, slip tags are limited in scope. It might not be possible to incorporate a security fix into a particular release tag, for example, all we would be able to do is tell people to upgrade to a later release. When we are able to stabilize the system interfaces (about a year and a half from now) this won’t be a big deal.”
Matt Dillon’s added fsstress in src/test/stress/fsstress. This tool has been found useful before.
Commit message quoted here:
“Add the filesystem/NFS stress tester program, adapted for BSD by Jordan H ubbard of Apple, originally written by Silicon Graphics, Inc, and modified by many people, including the SUSE Linux project.”