YONETANI Tomokazu reported his laptop was running very hot with DragonFly. The CPU was running when it didn’t need to be; Matt Dillon fixed this.
Peter Kadau has been talking about changing the userland scheduler (which could be done dynamically, as Matt Dillon pointed out) and a post out of that discussion by Matt Dillon does a nice job of summing up the differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD-5 process management.
The USB system from FreeBSD-5 has been brought in wholesale. Matt Dillon reports his camera, hard drive, mouse, and memory key all working and un/repluggable.
Also, the network interface cloning API from FreeBSD-5 has been brought in, from work by Max Laier and David Rhodus.
Joerg Sonnenberger has been adding a lot of port overrides – freetype2, xmms, etc. Always make sure to check dfports first when you want to add software.
David Rhodus added the pst driver to the GENERIC kernel, so if you are trying to install to a machine using a Promise card as disk controller (for RAID, I assume), it oughta work.
Dan Melomedman, during a discussion about using/not using bash in the base system, pointed at execline as a better alternative to shell scripting.
Sendmail 8.12.10 and BIND 8.3.7-REL are in, thanks to David Rhodus.
The kernel option USER_LDT is now on by default, as it’s useful for ports like Wine, or mplayer, and will be needed for threading. Suggested by Craig Dooley.
David Leimbach and others have kdebase from CVS building now.
The Marvell Yukon chipset now supports multicast. A small thing, but I’m hurting for news.
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down, and the news server is not responding. I don’t know if this is planned or not.
Update an hour later: It’s OK.
Not much happening right now. A few people have noticed that the binary NVIDIA driver doesn’t seem to work; big surprise there, with the system being in rapid change. Otherwise, puttering with the new RCNG services layout continues. In local news, I have the DragonFly mail archive mostly working now, including the kernel list.
A dfports update for net/bsd-airtools has been committed; Craig Dooley noted that the device layout for DragonFly has changed, making this override needed.
Matt Dillon has enhanced the varsym/RCNG system to support the following “states” for various services:
| running | The service is running |
| failed | A start or stop operation failed |
| disabled | The service is disabled |
| irrelevant | The server is not needed |
| configured | The non-process service has been configured |
| stopped | The service has been stopped |
He also posted the following:
“Call for volunteers! There are many
rc.d/scripts which do not support ‘stop’. Things likesshdandrwho, for example. It would be great if interested parties could start adding ‘stop’ functionality to the more common services. Submit patch sets to submit@dragonflybsd.org”
From Murray Stokely by way of Matt Dillon; a request for papers about BSD system use to present this summer in Boston:
“UseBSD will be a one-day special interest group session hosted as part of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston (June 27 – July 2, 2004). The focus of UseBSD, as the name implies, will be on showcasing ways in which creative members of the BSD community are making use of BSD-on the desktop, in embedded applications, in corporate data centers, in computational clusters, in business environments, and more!”
Matt Dillon’s updated RCNG in a big way. You can now check the status of, or start, stop, etc. different system services using appropriate single commands like rcstart, rcstop, rcrestart, and so on. varsym -sa will list service status.
The old way had you looking for the appropriate file in /etc/rc.d and issing commands for it, and having to poke throught ps -ax or /var/run/ to see what’s going.
To get this running, do make upgrade_etc in /usr/src/etc, or a regular build/installworld. Also, install /usr/src/sbin/rcrun, and reboot.
There’s a new Team page on the DragonFly website. I’m the one that put it together.
Jeroen Ruigrok has previously sent in patches to autoconf that allow it to recognize DragonFly as a system, and this should now be in autoconf CVS.
Jeffrey Hsu has added a rather complex patch for sendfile(2); I’m going to link to the changelog rather than sum up.