A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
For those readers who follow the emacs religion: Andreas Fuchs found that the emacs build expects /usr/lib/crtbegin.o, which does not exist on DragonFly. Rahul Siddharthan removed the mention of crtbegin.o from the makefile for emacs, and that seems to fix it.
Updated: Hiten Pandya added a port override for emacs, made by Aaron Malone. That solves it.
Among other source changes today, Matt Dillon made a change to the way priority is set for new processes, which should fix what he calls the ‘jerky X pointer’ problem. He also fixed the systimer in such a way that nice now actually works. The result is that your DragonFly system should now be even more responsive under heavy load.
Since “MFC” (Merged From Current) is used to denote a feature brought from FreeBSD 5 to FreeBSD 4, what would these be? MF4? In any case, Hiten Pandya has a lot of FreeBSD 4 commits he may want to bring into DragonFly. How many? This many.
‘esmith’ pointed out that the FireFox NetBSD binary at mozilla.org is available for download and appears to work fine on DragonFly.
Chris Pressey, style(9) maven, is now a committer. This is probably due to the large quantity of cleanup patches he has already submitted. Congratulations, Chris.
There’s a new ‘known good’ ISO on the DragonFly download page (2004-3-17b) that includes, among other things, a fixed OpenSSL and a number of USB improvements – there’s a /README.USB file now.
Matt Dillon posted some numbers on performance of NFS over Gigabit Ethernet – using TCP, he was able to hit 80-something megabytes per second right off the bat, and saw nearly 90 using UDP. This improvement stems from Hiten Pandya’s work on the em driver and NFS block size changes.
As seen on Daemonnews, The Jem Report has a comparison of FreeBSD 5 on an AMD64 machine and a Pentium 4 machine. FreeBSD 5 performance is not directly comparable to DragonFly, but the architecture comparison is useful.
Hiten Pandya has finished the if_xname work; you can now do:
# ifconfig fxp0 name 'LAN'
# ifconfig fxp1 name 'WAN'
And then refer to these network interfaces by the ‘LAN’ and ‘WAN’ names. These are aliases, not changed names, so the original names – fxp0 and fxp1 in this example – will still exist.
While talking about his (many, many) code cleanups, Chris Pressey pointed at the Erlang Programming Rules as a good guideline for programming style.
Shadow Committer Jeffrey Hsu is presenting a paper on DragonFly at AsiaBSDCon, and his paper can be downloaded now.
300 posts so far in about 8 months – yay me! I think it’s time to stop counting.
Are you using I4B/sppp? Don’t upgrade, as it’s the one interface that doesn’t support Berkley Packet Filters (BPF) and is temporarily broken while Joerg Sonnenberger works on the networking API. Contact Joerg if you are so lucky as to be affected by this.
Emiel Kollof is working on a DragonFly fortunes file. If you plan to say something clever involving DragonFly, do it where he can hear you.
Dheeraj Reddy submitted (and Eirik Nygaard committed) a patch taken from FreeBSD that removes Perl from mergemaster.
As seen on Daemonnews, OSNews has an interview with Matt Dillon about DragonFly.
Eirik Nygaard has added a dfport for devel/valgrind, based on Doug Rabson’s FreeBSD port.
Matt Dillon pointed out that we could have at least a binary packaging system relatively easily, now:
Continue reading “Matt makes plans”
Matt Dillon has posted his list of personal tasks to finish before the 1.0 release in June of this year.
Continue reading “Goals for 1.0”
‘Till’ has set up some interesting stats taken from the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet.