An oft-asked question about pkgsrc is, “How do I upgrade?”. There’s a number of ways to do it, with varying levels of danger and speed. This question has been asked enough times on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list that Jeremy C. Reed set up a wiki page describing the various tools. Bookmark it, cause someday you’ll want it.
Something that a lot of people could find useful: an extra multiprocessor kernel on the LiveCD. It’s apparently easy to add. (with tweaks) Any takers before January?
file 4.19 has been brought into DragonFly by Peter Avalos.
Vlad Galu posted jemalloc, noting that it performed well when freeing many small objects. (Along the same lines, Thomas E. Spanjaard brought up Google’s tcmalloc, though it’s not complete.) A benchmark showed good results, and Freddie Cash pointed at prior discussion for use in FreeBSD. It’ll take more persuasive numbers to get it in DragonFly, though.
Since the next release is coming up, I’m trying to clean out as many old bugs as possible. About a third of the bugs at bugs.dragonflybsd.org are cleaned out, but some of the remaining ones are older and may no longer apply.
If you’ve ever posted a bug to the bugs@ mailing list, please give bugs.dragonflybsd.org a look and make sure you don’t have any old issues sitting there.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s archive of DragonFly binaries for pkgsrc has been updated. Notably, this includes a DragonFly build of FireFox 2. It’s in the ‘/vulnerable‘ directory, since there’s (eternally) some security issue that qualifies it. ‘pkg_add ftp://path/to/that/firefox2/package‘ will get it installed for you.
Matthew Dillon wrote up an idea on how to adaptively deal with interrupt routing. He’s not working actively on it, so it’s available as a (possibly performance-enhancing) project.
The exact count stands at 2,003 posts with this one. Someone correct me if I’m wrong, but I think this may be the most frequently updated BSD-oriented news site in existence.
(via hubertf) BasicallyTech.com has an article up about using bc, the command line calculator. Basic but useful. I often type ‘cal‘, thinking that’s what I need for a calculator.
Sepherosa Ziehau, an already-prolific committer, has now committed a large quantity of updates: a sync of USB support from FreeBSD, along with the ural(4) (wireless CardBus) and rum(4) (wireless 802.11 over USB) drivers originally from OpenBSD.
Seen on pkgsrc-users@: A new tool for pkgsrc upgrades, called pkg_rolling-replace. It’s in pkgtools. It builds replacements for programs in order of dependency, without removing everything first. Strangely, it was funded by DARPA.
Also, the latest version of Apache 2.2 has been brought into pkgsrc. I link to the message because it also describes how to set the 2.2 version as the default for every other package that requires Apache.
A recent FreeBSD firewire bug that could also affect DragonFly is fixed.
geom_nbsd is a module that lets a FreeBSD machine read the disklabels from other BSD machines, including DragonFly.
Thomas Spanjaard’s ‘nata’ system now has a features description, plus how to patch and install, for those feeling adventurous.
If you happen to run out of bpfx devices, Joerg Sonnenberger has an easy solution: MAKEDEV more.
Thomas Spanjaard committed his new version (from FreeBSD, avoiding GEOM) of the ata architecture (nata). It can be compiled with this patch, though it’s not ready for use yet.
BSDStats.org sent out a summary of reporting hosts; there’s about 2,000 FreeBSD users and almost nobody else on other architectures. There’s only one DragonFly user reporting in North America, which I assume is me.
Peter Avalos has a port of OpenBSD’s dhclient program available for testing. The OpenBSD version runs with reduced privileges, compared to the current DragonFly dhclient.
Also, Victor Balada Diaz has his newest version of the jail code, allowing multiple IPs within a jail and also IPv6.
The newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Thomas Spanjaard. He’s currently working on an upgrade of the disk system.