Matthew Dillon’s working on a 4th iteration of Hammer, this time to address speed issues, among other things. There’s a bunch of commits to look at so far.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has updated gcc 4.4 to version 4.4.2 (not used by default), and binutils to version 2.2.0.
Sascha Wildner has added mandoc(1), an OpenBSD product. I like the HTML output. (I’ve said it before, come to think of it.)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added gdb 7 to the base system.
Version 3 of Hammer is now available in bleeding-edge DragonFly, though it’s still experimental. The biggest reason for this version bump is to move the /snapshots folder to /var for all Hammer filesystems. This means an accidental <tt>rm -rf</tt> won’t destroy snapshots, as I’ve done. The saved data is still on the original partition, as just the metadata is saved to /var. More explication is available.
Stathis Kamperis has ported POSIX message queues to DragonFly (from NetBSD) and has his eyes set on veriexec next.
If you use NFS, especially with vkernels, you may be interested in the latest round of NFS changes recently committed.
Matthew Dillon solved a performance problem that was most noticeable when doing intensive I/O while performing other tasks; downloading a large collection of files while opening another application that read a lot of initial data, for example, would have a noticeable startup delay. His recent VM change seems to have solved it, and the commit message has an in-depth explanation of how.
Alex Hornung has added support for a bunch of hardware to enable a Soekris 5501 to run DragonFly. We now have a watchdog and gpio framework as a side effect.
Mentioned here for completeness: tcsh has been updated, along with libarchive and opencrypto.
Stathis Kamperis, as part of his Summer of Code work, ported NetBSD’s POSIX message queues to DragonFly. He has a writeup of all the details, and even has test cases! It should be showing up in 2.5 soon.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.4 on amd64, you may have noticed trouble with USB drives or separate issues with ACPI. Both seem to be fixed by the same commit. It’s been merged to the 2.4 branch, so updating on that branch will get the fixes without moving to 2.5.
Alex Hornung has ported FreeBSD’s kbdmux, making it possible to run multiple keyboards. This can help if a system has a built-in virtual keyboard, as some newer HPs do.
If you’re running 10G Ethernet, Matthew Dillon’s turned on the inflight limiter by default, which should help keep your system from being overwhelmed if it’s not handling the greater volume of packets. If you’re not running 10G Ethernet, this shouldn’t affect you. If only we all could be so lucky.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert added a tool, chkmoddeps, which checks for missing modules that are required by other modules. Useful if you are working with the kernel.
Matthew Dillon’s changed the scheduler to fix a problem with small writes taking longer than they should. This should have a noticable, though not necessarily perfect effect on interactivity, especially for those using DragonFly as a desktop.
Alexander Polakov has made it possible to use UTF8 as the default system encoding, which makes non-ASCII characters viewable everywhere. It makes a full buildworld/buildkernel process necessary. He also did it without making /bin and /sbin dynamic, which is good news for anyone who might happen to lose /usr.
The 2.4 release will be later this month; Matthew Dillon has details. He appears to have already fixed the Hammer bug he mentions as a final issue before release.
Oh, look – Alex Hornung made Linux emulation work again. Thanks!