Matt Dillon’s changed the UPDATING document, separating the “Upgrade from FreeBSD” and the “Upgrade DragonFly” sections into separate passages.
‘esmith’ linked to another project that handles devices, used in Linux: “User-Space System Device Enumeration” (uDSE).
Looking for things to do? Here’s Hiten Pandya’s list of possible merges from FreeBSD. There’s a lot of tasks there of varying length and difficulty, so if you feel like trying something out, go for it and post your patch to the dragonfly.submit list.
Thanks to Matt Emmerton’s conversion work and my commit, the logo_saver KLD now shows the DragonFly logo instead of the BSD beastie. (Chuck’s gone to “bsdlogo”.)
Eirik Nygaard has added less version 381.
Jonathon McKitrick asked about “last known stable” tags, and the June release date for 1.0. Matt Dillon replied that a known stable tag will appear once the networking code is stable, and that a late June release is still planned
‘esmith’ asked about udev/hotplug in contrast to FreeBSD-5’s devfs, listing these links for more info.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev-FAQ
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1893
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml
Eirik Nygaard has updated the One True awk in DragonFly to version 20040207. This temporarily broke the buildworld process, so if you tried a buildworld this afternoon and it failed with awk, it should now work. (Fixed by David Rhodus.)
David Rhodus has added the twa(4) driver, for the 3Ware Escalade 9000 series storage controller, based on Vinod Kashyap’s version in FreeBSD.
Joerg Sonnenberger is merging some FreeBSD 5.x changes to kobj, which changes the ABI. This means rebuild all modules on your next kernel build. That includes your nvidia driver, too, if you have it.
Matt Dillon found that using short-form names in /etc/fstab would cause the DNS resolver to return “host not found”, even if there was just a timeout (which should result in “try again”) when first looking up that name. This is now fixed. If you found you could not mount NFS volumes at boot, but they worked when done manually after boot, this should fix it.
Eirik Nygaard has committed diffutils 2.8.1 into the tree. This is similar to previous third-party software additions in that DragonFly-specific changes are managed through additional patches to original code, not by creating a DragonFly-only version of diffutils. Future upgrades are made much more easy using this method.
Based on a patch from Tobias ‘ibotty’ Florek, Eirik Nygaard has set DragonFly to build only Brian Kernighan’s One True awk. gawk, the GNU version of awk, is out. I’ll just take a geek moment here and point out Kernighan’s “The Practice of Programming” is one of my favorite computer books ever.
Jeremy Almey alerted me to the DragonFly Wikipedia entry that he maintains – a good summary of the project, including one of the better explanations of tokens and the LWKT that I’ve seen.
Andre Nathan asked for links on SSI (Single System Image), since that’s DragonFly’s pie-in-the-sky goal. Walt gave a link to Larry McVoy’s paper (Linux-specific) on the subject.
Matt Dillon has added negative caching for NFS, meaning that NFS will now cache failed lookups, not just successful ones. He details the benefits like so:
“This makes a HUGE difference for programs which search nfs directories, such as compilers (the header file search path),
make, and a few other utilities. NFS packet traffic can be reduced upwards of 90%. For example, with/usr/srcmounted via NFS, building libc a second time without negative caching generates 66000 packets of NFS traffic in each direction, building libc a second time with negative caching enabled generates 9500 packets worth of NFS traffic, in EACH DIRECTION. While it is true that negative lookups are cached on the NFS server, the huge reduction in network traffic and equivalent reduction in synchronous read latencies result in radically reduced overheads across the board for operations which generate a lot of negative hits. A buildworld test with the default 3 second negative caching timeout went from 2265 seconds to 1900 seconds.”
Now there’s NetBSD quarterly reports, too. Seems like reader-friendly BSD reports is a good idea, eh?
Matt Dillon’s posted about the namecache work he plans to be doing now; his summary is included here.
Continue reading “More namecache plans”