Matthew Dillon is working on moving more of DragonFly out from under the Giant Lock. This may mean some instability this week if you’re following the bleeding-edge. He’s already posted a warning and an explanation (with numbers!) of work already completed.
Matthew Dillon has refactored the lwkt_token code, for an unspecified speed improvement. He’s been doing a lot of MP-lock cleanup recently…
If you have previously tried 64-bit DragonFly on a system with more than 3G of RAM and it failed to boot, the problem is fixed.
Sascha Wildner has added -Werror to the kernel build process. Warnings will now result in an error that stops the kernel from building. If you’re a developer, this will force you to create warning-free code when doing kernel development. If you’re a user, this will result in a cleaner, more stable kernel.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5, Matthew Dillon has changed thread and process structures, meaning that a full rebuild of kernel and modules is necessary on the next system update.
Matthew Dillon has moved the Big Giant Lock off of a whole bunch of syscalls. This should make a noticeable difference in a multiprocessing context, though I don’t have measured results to point at. (hint, hint…)
Thanks to Michael Neumann, it’s now possible to remove a drive from a Hammer volume. It’s experimental, so all the standard warnings apply.
This can’t be done on a root volume, for hopefully obvious reasons.
Did you know you a Hammer volume can span multiple disks? And that you can add extra disks later on? There’s no RAID-like features – it’s just a straight multiple-disk volume, but it works. The Hammer command to do it is now “hammer volume-add“
A number of recent changes will be important to you if you develop on DragonFly:
- Sascha Wildner has added a indent(1) profile that matches what is usually done in DragonFly.
- Also, there’s a dragonfly.el for emacs users.
- Now new, but worth mentioning again: there is an excellent development(7) man page.
- Alex Hornung has ported and modified FreeBSD’s minidumps, so crash dumps can now be kept smaller than your total physical memory size.
Matthew Dillon has made version 4 of Hammer the default; the upgrade is a relatively painless ‘hammer upgrade’ command. This new version cuts out a chunk of the disk syncs needed, speeding up Hammer disk operations.
Alexander Polakov has imported OpenBSD’s hotplugd(8). It monitors for hotplug-style events, like disk additions and removals, and executes corresponding scripts to handles those events.
It’s now possible to boot a vkernel using an NFS share as the root. Now, you can have a networked virtual system!
Aggelos Economopoulos has committed Jan Lentfer’s update of BIND to 9.5.2-P1. It fixes CVE-2009-4022, though that bug never affected DragonFly by default.
SSH, on DragonFly, now defaults to allowing root logins, but does not allow plaintext password logins. This is on new installs only, so any existing installations won’t be affected, even after upgrades. Plaintext passwords are under constant brute-force attack for some years now, so this is probably safer.
Sascha Wildner has added pkgin to the base DragonFly system. It’s still present as a pkgsrc package, so it’s manageable and upgradeable with the normal pkg_* tools. See prior discussion here for the history.
Did I already make that joke? Oh well. less has been updated to version 4.3.6 from a patch by Jan Lentfer.
I mentioned it for testing, and now it’s ready: BIND 9.5.2 is in DragonFly.
OpenSSL has been updated to version 0.9.8l by Aggelos Economopoulos; this fixes a security vulnerability. The update is available for 2.4.1 and 2.5 – update to get it.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has changed 64-bit DragonFly to be tagged “x86_64” instead of “amd64”. It seems most other operating systems use that for 64-bit system architechure names. So does pkgsrc, which may fix some recent builds on amd64 x86_64