BSD Magazine is looking for articles – specifically DragonFly articles, though I imagine it doesn’t have to be. I’m stretched too thin to write anything right now, but if you have something, contact them.
The freeze for the next version of pkgsrc, 2012Q1, will start March 22nd and end with the quarterly release being released on April 6th.
(I hope someone gets the joke.)
Here’s the page, with a convenient mentor application note at the bottom. That’s the next step, so if you were thinking of mentoring, now is the time.
John Marino’s updated DragonFly’s version of GCC 4.4 to 4.4.7, apparently the final version of GCC 4.4. What’s next? I imagine GCC 4.6 at some point. It’s always a fun (maybe bikeshed-ish) conversation on which compiler to install, and which to have in base.
For the curious, I recently sent a bulk build report for pkgsrc-2011Q4 to the lists. Other than ruby-193 (which is fixed in pkgsrc HEAD thanks to John Marino), we’re looking pretty good! I’m curious if KDE or Gnome could actually get installed via binary; that’s sort of an ultimate goal due to the number of packages involved.
Speaking of Ruby, the default in pkgsrc may change soon, along with some of the involved Rails packages.
If you’re trying DragonFly 3 in a virtual machine, you may have noticed some issues in booting in (for instance) Qemu. Sepherosa Ziehau committed a change that sets the sysctl hw.ioapic_enable to 0 in virtual environments. It can always be turned back on, but the recent MSI/MSI-X improvements seem to cause trouble in some virtual environment. You can also set that tunable at boot to get an initial install going.
(I haven’t had trouble in Virtualbox or VMWare, so you may or may not need this.)
As several people have told me, there’s benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 vs. 2.10, available on Phoronix. CPU performance shows a significant improvement, in tests that actually test it. (I’d think a file compression test would be disk-limited, for instance.) Disk performance isn’t as great, but that may be in part because Hammer no longer will starve reading to benefit writing; that makes benchmarks look worse but improves real-world interactivity. I’m sure there’s more quibbling to do, since it’s lies, damn lies benchmarks.
If for some reason you needed DragonFly 2.6 ISOs, or older, there’s a mirror.
It’s now possible to specify a jail ID when using pgrep and pkill(1), to capture processes specific to a jail. It’s similar to the same option in FreeBSD, except no compatibility issues since this option did not previously exist in DragonFly.
If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.
This is the week where I remember to actually write introductory text. I also didn’t think I was going to have anything good this week, but The Internet came through for me at the last minute. Thanks, Internet! It’s also the week where I mis-schedule this post for Friday, temporarily.
- You may not need to Build Command Line Tools in Style, but I like the way the slides in this presentation … slide.
- This is another version of the “my computer should be free” argument. (via) The argument has been made before, though this version is slightly less antic.
- It’s always neat to see notes from someone trying DragonFly for the first time. Desktop and video editing… that’s going to be a hard road, though.
- Unix == ZZ Top. (via)
- Where vi came from. The original terminal had arrows on the HJKL keys.
- An in-depth explanation of HTTPS Everywhere.
- Dungeon creation using a dungeon! Next: recursive dragons, I just know it. (via)
Your unrelated link of the week: Welcome to Muppet Labs, where the future is being made today!
I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:
“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it. I don’t know if it still applies.
Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.
Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs. Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.
If you’re in New York City or the UK, there’s two new DragonFly mirrors for your downloading pleasure. Check the mirrors page for details.
Matthew Dillon’s CPU bug hunt has scattered its way across various news sites, some more accurate than others. He’s posted a followup that is probably a more valuable read than any of the news reports.
Have you ever tried to run a service and realized you forgot to make an entry in rc.conf to enable it? It’s mildly annoying. There’s now a “one’ keyword (via NetBSD) that lets you enable a service, once. It still apparently performs sanity checks, unlike the otherwise-similar ‘force’ keyword.
The March issue of BSD Magazine is out, as a free PDF as always. It’s a real grab-bag of topics this time, so there should be something to interest you. This time, it might be an article on DragonFly and Beowulf clusters. (I was totally not expecting that.)
A few days ago, I posted about Python 2.4 and Python 2.5 leaving pkgsrc – it looks like it’ll be a little bit longer, at least for the 2.5 version. This means the Zope packages will be gone too, since they depend on Python 2.4. This won’t affect you if you aren’t using these packages, of course.
Notice how the 2.12 release never really happened, and 3.0 came out about 6 months later than usual? A lot of that delay was caused by a vigorous search for a weird bug. Multi-threaded buildworlds would crash, seemingly randomly and rarely. It turns out we have confirmation from AMD that it is, indeed, a CPU hardware bug.
The organization application for DragonFly is in for Google Summer of Code. If you are thinking of working as a mentor or as a student, please let me know soon! We will know if we’re accepted (for the 5th time!) on the 16th.