A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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.
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.