Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes that led to a 10% and then 20% gain (don’t know if that was cumulative or separate) in network speed for DragonFly. That’s great! It only has a noticeable effect if you’re on 10G Ethernet, though. The obvious answer to that: upgrade your network.
Tim Bisson’s work on TRIM support has been committed. I don’t know if it will show in 2.12, but it’s off by default so it would seem a safe move.
Did you notice zgrep went missing? Well, it’s available again, thanks to YONETANI Tomokazu.
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH to version 5.9p1. This might be the last thing before the next DragonFly release.
Update on the update: he updated OpenSSL (1.0.0e) and file (5.09) too.
From what I can tell, Sepherosa Ziehau’s made some changes where you can control TCP timeout and keepalive timing on a per-tcpcb basis, or at least that’s what I gleaned from the docs. He’s been doing a lot of work lately, but it’s hard to link to because so much of it is at a basic level that makes it difficult to summarize in terms of how the features affect the user.
Sascha Wildner updated time zone files again. It’s a regular thing, but I wanted to draw attention to this little change:
Samoa moves from east to west of the international date line (changes from UTC-11 to UTC+13). It will skip December 30, 2011.
2011/12/30 in Samoa will never exist or have existed, which is entirely odd.
Another batch of code has arrived from Google Summer of Code student work. In this case, it’s code from Adam Hoka’s “Implementing a mirror target for device mapper” project, committed by Alex Hornung. I think there’s potentially more to come.
Google Summer of Code for 2011 just finished, and there’s already source code from it showing up in DragonFly. In this case, scheduler work, including multiple schedulers. I’ll have a more detailed report soon…
If you’re running 64-bit DragonFly, and you’re on version 2.11, you will want to rebuild with the latest sources. Peter Avalos found a bug with file descriptor passing, and Venkatesh Srinivas fixed it. It will require a quickworld/kernel build – maybe a full buildworld and kernel? I’m not sure. Some pkgsrc packages might need recompilation, too if they also passed file descriptors around.
Well, if you tell it to do so. Matthew Dillon has added a user-settable limit to the amount of memory used during deduplication, so if your Hammer-using system is low on RAM, you can conserve. This is probably most useful if you are running DragonFly in an extremely small VM, or if your name is Venkatesh.
(inside joke; Venkatesh has a crazy old desktop for DragonFly.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has, over the last few months, effectively completed the “Update ACPI and interrupt routing” code bounty on the DragonFly code bounties page. Yay! I’m on the hook for the $50 I pledged towards that… (it’s already off the page; here’s the change if you want to see it.)
I really just like that phrase and the action movie feeling of using it, like “Watch out! The pulse-width modulated time-domain multiplexer is targeting us!” Sorta like a PU-36 space modulator. It’s actually a recently-committed mechanism to improve write performance in Hammer, but my idea sounds more exciting.
John Marino has made binutils 2.21.1 the default binutils in DragonFly, and gprof is now built but not in the default path.
Alex Hornung has made a pile of changes for disk encryption, including adding libdm, a “simple BSD-licensed libdevmapper“,and adding tcplay, a 100% compatible implementation of TrueCrypt. This should make you very happy if you like running from an encrypted disk.
Update: Alex has written an in-depth explanation of this work. It’s a huge change!
Update update: Hey, it’s showing on Hacker News too!
If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.11, it’s worth updating. Matthew Dillon fixed a networking bug that I’ve seen cause problems. It was introduced within 2.11’s lifetime, so as far as I know, this won’t affect anyone on 2.10.
Sascha Wildner has enabled the CPU_ENABLE_EST option for x86_64 kernels. If you’re on x86_64, you can now use Enhanced Speedstep Technology. (i386 users already could.)
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.