A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
I recently did a bulk build of pkgsrc on two similar machines; the only significant difference being extra CPU work being done on one system, and Hammer snapshots on the other. However, they’re diverging in speed over time, which is interesting but not yet conclusive. Read my post about it for more details.
A good benchmarking project would be testing Hammer with snapshots on and with snapshots off.
Taking from his AHCI work, Matthew Dillon’s working on a Silicon Image 3132 driver. An initial version is available now, though the usual caveats about a brand-new device driver apply.
Update: he’s really moving fast on this.
Hasso Tepper posted his notes on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list about the different video modes for the Intel video driver. Version 2.7 works, but only if you use certain options.
The pkgsrc freeze is on. We should have release 2009Q2 in 2 weeks…
If you’re one of the few who has seen a ‘no local apic!’ error when booting, Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit may have a fix for that. He asks for testers, though he cautions to do it without APIC_IO in your kernel config.
Matthew Dillon is relentlessly adding to his AHCI work, with a new status report summing up the speed and stability improvements. The driver will probably end up in the next DragonFly release.
Matthew Dillon has initial support in for port multipliers, along with other AHCI work. It’s not ready for production yet, and he lists the various issues going on, including a need for a different way to mount disks – AHCI changes devicenames from ‘ad’ to ‘da’, which can be a hassle.
Update: hot-swap support, too.
Update update: parallel scans for speed.
The freeze for pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release starts this Sunday, the 14th. The 2009Q2 release should follow two weeks afterwards, which will be very close to the time of the next planned DragonFly release. (2.4, in case you weren’t counting.)
I’ve just finished a new build of the 2009Q1 packages for DragonFly 2.2, and it’s available on http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages – setting BINPKG_SITES or using pkg_chk can get you these latest versions.
I plan to have a 2009Q2 package set for DragonFly 2.4 as soon as possible after release.
Sascha Wildner has posted a patch that makes it very easy to switch out the compiler used to build DragonFly. This builds on earlier work from Alex Hornung.
This should make it into the base system. Everyone’s looking at compilers that aren’t gcc these days, it seems.
The pkg_radd(1) and pkg_search(1) utilities defaulted to pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org. They’ve been switched (by me) to point at avalon.dragonflybsd.org, which has much more bandwidth.
Matthew Dillon’s added AHCI as a kernel module, and has directions for testing. It’s not done, but he has basic hot-plug support in, among other things.
I’ve been posting a lot of “hey test this new technology” items, lately. That’s good. Since I haven’t done it already, here’s a description of AHCI.
Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses. Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.
This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.
I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.
I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.
Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre. I wish I had a spare $200.
Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?
An entertaining diversion: a fantasy map of C++. It’s huge; give it time to download. (via)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for various power states on AMD Phenom and Turion-series processors. He has some specific notes that mention there’s more processor family support on the way. Good news for anyone with an AMD-based laptop.
Matthew Dillon has committed the start of his AHCI work, taken mostly from OpenBSD. He described what he’s doing in a separate post, along with the welcome news of the enhanced performance that comes with AHCI support.
Alex Hornung posted a summary of how his work on devfs is going, and Jordan Gordeev posted a summary of how much AMD64 is functional.
If you want to try either one (warning: many parts still broken!), use a vkernel for the devfs so a physical system doesn’t get broken. There’s build instructions for pulling together AMD64 DragonFly.
Update: manual instructions for AMD64, too.
Not one, but two roguelike items! Close your eyes and click randomly if you have no interest in my little obsession.
Dru Lavigne’s excellent book ‘BSD Hacks’ is available at Scribd, and a chunk of it is readable through the preview at that site. A good chunk of what’s in there applies to DragonFly.
My copy is sitting on the shelf near by, inbetween ‘Perl Best Practices‘ and ‘The Mythical Man-Month‘.
I linked to articles from last week’s issue of the Economist before, but now that I made it to the other end of the magazine, there’s another one of interest that doesn’t mention open source but still relates to it: An article on intellectual property that covers how to handle antitrust legislation and companies where the property is mostly virtual. Useful to anyone who has dealt with the GPL and/or Microsoft. (i.e. everyone)
Also, not really open source related, but computer games can be good for you. I really like this magazine – not because I agree with them, but because they at least examine things in depth, and avoid the usual computing blunders you see in print.
If you don’t want to read the whole magazine yourself, there’s a nice summary available. (that link covers the previous week; recap of this issue possibly this weekend.
A useful BSD item from the Howling Void: BSD jails found to be more efficient than VMWare in given situations. I am both pleased and not really surprised.