A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert pointed out prelinking should be mentioned on the 2003 report; here’s the text that will soon show up on that report:
Prelinking
Prelinking capability was added to DragonFly by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, which allows faster loading of applications that use a large number of dynamic libraries while running, like Qt/KDE. It is not currently hooked into the system or any port building process.
Matt Dillon fixed an apparently long-term problem in OpenSSH where a server can hang because it has a lot of data to send, but no immediate resources to do it with.
Reproduce it like so:
limit filesize 64k
ssh remotebox -n cat /usr/share/dict/words | cat > junkfile
The IBM ServeRAID controller is now supported, thanks to TONETANI Tomokazu. That would be the “ips” device.
David Rhodus has the journaling filesystem code from Apple located in vfs_journal.c and vfs_journal.h. He estimate it’d take 2-3 (long) days of work to get it worked into the system, which would mean no more long fscks after unlcean shutdowns. Any takers? Everyone would love you for it.
Eirik Nygaard was looking for something to do; Max Laier pointed out removal of #if defined(__FreeBSD__) / #if __FreeBSD_version > 5 would help, and Jeffrey Hsu indicated backporting the UFS2 size extensions would also be good.
I’ll quote my own followup to say there’s plenty of non-coding tasks available, too.
The main DragonFly website now has an additional mirror listed (bottom of page) for daily snapshots, and Matt Dillon’s put up slides from his talk at BAFUG in a new Docs section.
Port-fixing fiend Joerg Sonnenberger has committed a dfports override for OpenOffice.
David Rhodus imported Hyperthreading changes from FreeBSD which allow you to automatically use Hyperthreading on supported CPUs with just the regular multiprocessor options turned on in your kernel; e.g. options SMP, options APIC_IO.
However, the DragonFly version has no idling loops in it to reduce CPU resource contention. Because of the way DragonFly schedules per-CPU/sends IPI messages, there’s no performance issue caused by multiple CPUS HLTing. Already, a benefit.
In a discussion about a submitted firewall design, Jeroen Ruigrok listed Data Size Neutrality at unix.org.
Dave Leimbach has added changes to KDE in CVS to allow kdebase to compile on DragonFly. This is in the actual KDE source code, not a ports override.
Joerg Sonnenberger is looking for anyone with either PCCARD or CARDBUS hardware, for testing of this patch and this patch.
He noted, “After applying both patches remove bus/pccard and link bus/pcmcia to bus/pccard.”
The dragonflybsd.org website now contains a FAQ, which is mostly my fault.
Inspired in part by the semi-regular status reports for FreeBSD, I put together (with help from a number of people, including Hiten Pandya and David Rhodus) a DragonFly status report for 2003.
I’ve cleaned up my local archive of the DragonFly discussion groups so that start and end dates are correct; they are available at http://www.shiningsilence.com/mailarchive/.
Paul Herman, Senior Researcher of the Kitchen Refrigerator, has a really nice writeup about time and clocks in operating systems (with graphs, even!), and work he wants to bring into DragonFly.
A bunch of changes came in:
hostname now takes a -r option that will set the hostname based on reverse lookup of an IP address, or -i which does the same using the computer’s primary IP. It also works on IPv4 or IPv6. This very good idea comes from Kent Ibbetson.
mixer has had FreeBSD-5 changes added in. It now can take relative volume changes, thanks to Craig Dooley.
Jeroen Ruigrok added in support for the SoundBlaster Audigy and Audigy 2, apparently sourced from “patches by Orlando Bassotto, which were taken from the ALSA Project and the SoundBlaster OSS repository”.
Max Laier’s if_xname patches have been commited; If I recall correctly, this allows for some different ways to refer to existing network interfaces. Here’s the original post.
Aaron Malone created a patch for src/sys/boot/forth/beastie.4th (now committed) that replaces the ‘beastie’ boot with a dragonfly. He’s working on a dragonfly ASCII console screen saver, too. Now we just need a graphical one too…
Michal Pasternak posted a plea for use of Pkgsrc to the submit discussion group. Given that he specifically said he wasn’t participating in that group and wasn’t going to do any work to make pkgsrc compatible, and that VFS is not yet complete, that’s probably as far as it will go. I’m editorializing.