Month: March 2004

Matt Dillon had what he described as a “brainfart for threaded VFS and data passing between threads” based on Alan Cox’s FreeBSD 5 PIPE work that he has been importing, leading to a new concept he calls “XIO”. It’s a long ramble, so I’m reprinting it wholesale:
Continue reading “Dillon Brainfart”

Chris Pressey, the newest committer, has been in a cleanup frenzy – he’s had 140 commits already, many of them cleanup of the existing source code. Go Chris!

The Fred Plush is apparently not as expensive to ship to the western hemisphere as initially expected – mail fred at ibotty.net for details – he can take PayPal now.

There’s pictures of a prototype of the plush DragonFly mascot. It’s missing one set of legs, but it’s otherwise accurate to what is being sold.

Steve Mynott brought up pmap and vmmap as utilities he’d like to see in DragonFly.

Tobias Florek has plush Freds – the dragonfly mascot for DragonFly. He’s in Europe, and it costs 16 Euros plus shipping – mail fred at ibotty.net. First come, first serve. If you live on the western side of the Atlantic, shipping costs make it prohibitive, so no luck for U.S. and Canada residents yet. (A U.S. distributor is being worked on.)

Joerg Sonnenberger added to the partion discussion:

The alternative for /tmp is to have lots of swap and MFS for /tmp. This is often faster and avoids the lots of old crap in /tmp problem.
In that case you should make /var/tmp its own partition. In general /tmp and /var/tmp as world writable locations should be on partitions
on there own. Making /usr/obj a filesystem of its own has the advantage
of faster cleaning — just unmount, newfs and remount it :)

He also noted that having specific partitions for things like news spools (/news/) and mail stores (/var/spool/) is that it allows the blocksize to be set much smaller, which decreases wasted space when dealing with lots and lots of small files.

Matt Dillon responded to a question from David Cuthbert about partition letters; as part of that, he recommended this sort of partion layout:

If you have a large system, it is often a good idea to separate out oft-written directories such as /usr/obj, and to make /tmp larger. /var/tmp is usually made a softlink to /tmp. If you have or intend to process a lot of mail, making /var larger is a good idea. If you are running a mail server it is often a good idea to make /var/spool its own partition (and /var/mail its own partition if you are running a large mail pop service or have a lot of users). If you are running a large web server making /usr/local/www its own partition (the base of Apache’s site directory) is a good idea.

Matt Dillon’s changes to buildworld are done; the next make buildworld you do will take a bit longer, but you should be able to do make quickworld thereafter, which should be… quicker!

Be careful, for the time being, doing a make -j, though. If that fails, Matt asks:

In one xterm: make -j 4 buildworld >& /tmp/bw.out
In another xterm: tail -f /tmp/bw.out | fgrep ===

Save the results, and post a link to it in the kernel discussion group.

Matt Dillon has changed some settings on the DragonFly news server that mirrors the mailing list traffic; now, all posts ever made are visible.

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.

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.