A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Hasso Tepper noticed that the scheduler performance on his DragonFly desktop was poor. Interactivity went way down whenever he had multiple intensive processes running, like building software while browsing the web.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to have greatly improved responsiveness; there’s even more explanation available.
If you wanted some hacked pkgsrc packages of Mesa and xorg-server, so that you could try out Hasso Tepper’s DRM patch, well, Steve O’Hara-Smith has you covered.
This cartoon from XKCD is very entertaining.
It looks like Jost Tobias Springenberg is planning to revamp DragonFly’s fdisk, which will be much appreciated.
Hasso Tepper has posted his “personal pkgsrc FAQ” – touching on some of the issues around pkgsrc on DragonFly, and pointing out pretty clearly that pkgsrc binary builds need some support, which is partially my fault.
Dmitry Komissaroff has a patch that will get DragonFly booting with ACPI on an Asus Eee 701, though just why hasn’t been figured out yet.
Update: new patch
I’ve finished a bulk build of pkgsrc package binaries for pkgsrc-current and DragonFly 2.0.1, which is on pkgbox now, and should be available on mirrors soon. Hasso Tepper completed a similar and slightly more successful build.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent change to libpcap means that dumps of network traffic taken before this change won’t be readable with libpcap after this change. Unlikely to affect anyone unless you are both dumping a lot of data off the network and updating your system rapidly, but worth mentioning.
This is not really part of DragonFly, but it will be interesting for some people. Matthew Dillon’s updated his personal investment notes to focus on the recent credit upheaval.
Sepeherosa Ziehau has a patch for carp(4) users; it apparently removes some unneeded complexity.
Testing software upgrade for this blog; pay no attention.
Fluff for the article: Dear Santa Claus: buy me this flash storage. Most older men buy a sports car for their midlife crisis; geeks buy overpowered computer hardware.
The FreeBSD Foundation has 66% of the money they need to raise for the year; chip in, if you can. It gets you a tax break (at least in the U.S.) and they do good work.
Hiroki Sato has posted a reminder: the deadline for AsiaBSDCon 2009 paper submission is December 20th.
InsideSoCal‘s Click column has a nice review up of DragonFly; I remember reading this before and somehow not thinking to publish it. In my defense, I’ve been running a serious news backlog, from all these Git events. Anyway, I was reminded by the DistroWatch newsletter, which has an image of that very pretty LiveDVD desktop.
XHomer, a Linux (and possibly BSD; it’s untried) emulator of the DEC Pro 350 computer, is not that exciting unless you happened to own one way back when. However, look at the last of the screenshots, using the phrase “trans-cranial shock therapy“. Keep that in mind next time you’re thinking of taking a screenshot of an X desktop with the typical IRC client, music player, web browser, and widget display: be surprising. (via)
Jason Dixon’s doing a good job of publicity, so you’ve probably already seen this, but: BSDTalk 167 is Jason Dixon talking about DCBSDCon, happening this February.
The newest @Play column describes the general types of items found in roguelike games, and also covers the winners of the recent NetHack tournament. It’s a more enjoyable read than how I’m making it sound,
