DMA, the DragonFly Mail Agent, has been updated so that it can deliver email from cron job output. DMA is a former Summer of Code project to make a local-only mailer for DragonFly systems, so that larger mail transfer agents (like Sendmail or Postfix) are not needed on a system that isn’t designed to receive mail from external sources. There’s a TODO list (click the gitweb link) if you’d like to contribute.
It’s now possible to set up rules for your dynamic device file system. If this intrigues you, and it should, there’s more details about the rules within the devfsctl(8) man page.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has removed GCC 3.4 and Kerberos 5/Heimdal from the base system. Kerberos hasn’t been building as part of base for a while, and is available in pkgsrc. It was also the last item that requires GCC 3.4, so buildworlds are little quicker now. (Cross your fingers that GCC 4.2 the current version doesn’t break somehow.)
As predicted, size_t and ssize_t is back to normal. (Hasso already noted this in a reply to the original post.)
Matthew Dillon’s made some changes to Hammer that make performance during mixed operations (reading and writing requests at the same time) much faster. This should work for everyone, though AHCI/SILI/SCSI users will notice it more. The new writing system is called ‘BIOQ‘.
Matthew Dillon’s made some improvements to Hammer’s read and write processes. To quantize this, he’s tested Hammer and UFS with blogbench and written up the results. The tl;dr summary: UFS performs well until the system cache runs out, and then it halts. Hammer has some overhead from saving all history, but doesn’t stop working under a much heavier load.
The mpt(4) driver has been updated, thanks to Alexander Polakov. This is useful for anyone using LSI Logic hardware for fibre channel disks, for instance.
Vinum’s been changed to work with devfs, with the advantage that drive labels instead of device paths can now be used. There’s some caveats – read the message for details.
The amount of swap space usable under DragonFly has gone to a theoretical max of 4 terabytes. The practical limit is probably around 512 gigabytes. As Matthew Dillon writes, this could be interesting when paired with SSDs.
As Hasso Tepper pointed out, having GCC 4.4 in DragonFly is unique to DragonFly. Systems like pkgsrc don’t work due to the changes in headers and etc. between gcc 4.2 and 4.4, and since no other BSD uses gcc 4.4, the fixes would all have to come from DragonFly (and be backward compatible). This is unlikely to change in the near term, since this newer version of gcc is being refused due to the V3 GNU Public License, not a technical issue. It’ll stay in DragonFly for now.
However, you can specifically exclude it and speed up buildworlds with the new NO_GCC44 option. It’s also possible to use NO_GCC34 in make.conf to keep the old version of gcc from building, for those who don’t like to wait.
Any commits to DragonFly go to the commits@dragonflybsd.org mailing list. The subject format has been reduced to “git: “, branchname, and the first line of the commit message. Keep that in mind when constructing your commit messages, and if you have any filters based on subject line for your mail.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been working on an import of gcc 4.4 to DragonFly; it’s not usable yet, but when it is, it means the 3.x gcc code can be dropped.
A recent change from Matthew Dillon makes it possible for a NFS client connection to be cleanly re-established after a reboot. Previously, the server would lose track of the client.
Thanks to Xin Li, gzip now supports pack and can unpack archives in that format.
Peter Avalos has made it possible for TCP buffers to be automatically sized according to need, which improves performance when latency goes up. It’s already in.
Release 2.3.2 has been tagged, for anyone who wants to stick with DragonFly past the current release but before the recent radical changes to NFS. Check the commit message for a summary of what’s changed since 2.3.1, taken from the commit messages.
Well, default as of the next release. With the recent changes to NFS, TCP will be needed in most circumstances. It’s still possible to force UDP if desired with the ‘mntudp’ option, or ‘udp’ if you’re using a 2.3.x system.
It is now possible to mount a Hammer PFS via NFS, though you’ll want to use NFSv3.
Peter Avalos has updated gzip, with a far longer list of updates than I would have thought possible with a utility that’s been around for a while.
Matthew Dillon made some major changes to NFS, which have greatly improved speed. He’s also made the clients able to write asychronously, which can overwhelm a server because of this increased throughput. Be careful.