Hey, look at what Michael Neumann’s doing: making Hammer expandable! It will be possible to expand your Hammer volumes while online, even.
(note: it’s experimental; don’t be surprised if it destroys data.)
DragonFly has its first 10G network driver, mxge(4), for the Myricom Myri10GE. Aggelos Economopoulos ported it from FreeBSD. Check his post for notes and credits for the people who helped out.
Michael Neumann has removed the PRISON_ROOT flag, and has changed jail(8) code to use only prison_priv_check() to check for allowed operations. This won’t mean anything from a user standpoint, but it does make programming easier.
pipe(2) is now MPSAFE, meaning it can take advantage of multiple processors without the Giant Lock. Matthew Dillon published some before-and-after stats in his commit.
The kernel option PCI_MAP_FIXUP has been removed as of July 11th; if you’re upgrading past that point, make sure to remove that option.
The in-progress code for the Summer of Code project ‘DragonFly on AMD64’ has been imported; you can now build for SMP on AMD64, and complete a installworld/buildworld, natively. Modules don’t (yet) compile…
Virtual kernels are now SMP by default on DragonFly, even if you don’t have multiple processors/cores.
Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to version 1.0.0 and tcpdump to 4.0.0. (tcpdump site) I’d guarantee that having at least a passing familiarity with tcpdump will eventually, someday, solve an otherwise intractable problem for you.
Threading libraries libc_r and libthread_xu have been synchronized by Hasso Tepper; this shouldn’t cause noticeable issues. The potential issues he mentions for pkgsrc appear fixed, as I haven’t had any significant trouble (from that, at least) during bulk builds.
Sascha Wildner has made it possible to include “other” compilers (meaning not GCC) in DragonFly’s build system. His post has additional details.
The hammer command now has an ‘info’ option, which gives a great deal of information on your Hammer drives, thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez. (Committed)
Matthew Dillon fixed a problem with AHCI on July 2nd. If you are running AHCI from before that date with a port multiplier, you may want to update. Further tests have completed without issues.
Alexander Polakov has put together an update of PCI bus and ACPI interrupt handling code taken mostly from FreeBSD, and ported it to DragonFly. Please try it out – if you previously had booting issues with DragonFly, this may have cured them.
Sascha Wildner has added an option to the installer to create a UFS boot and Hammer volume as an install disk, in addition to the all-Hammer and all-UFS options already available. Programs expecting the booting kernel to be on UFS will be able to find it, but users still get the benefits of Hammer.
Updated: It replaces the all-Hammer option. Thanks for the correction, Sascha!
Matthew Dillon has a new version of Hammer, which speeds up listings from programs like ‘ls -la’ and ‘find’. This is only in 2.3.1.x code right now, so don’t force an upgrade via hammer version-upgrade if you’re still on DragonFly 2.2. His post includes some benchmarks.
On a side note: sili(4) tests look good.
I’ve heard of Dvorak keyboard layouts, but I didn’t know there’s another, called Colemak. Sascha Wildner has committed a patch from Geert Hendrickx which makes Colemak layouts available on DragonFly.
A number of people have noticed that Hammer’s pruning (which by default runs once at midnight) makes systems temporarily unresponsive. Matthew Dillon’s committed a fix for this, with warnings of more improvements to come.
Taking from his AHCI work, Matthew Dillon’s working on a Silicon Image 3132 driver. An initial version is available now, though the usual caveats about a brand-new device driver apply.
Update: he’s really moving fast on this.
If you’re one of the few who has seen a ‘no local apic!’ error when booting, Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit may have a fix for that. He asks for testers, though he cautions to do it without APIC_IO in your kernel config.
Matthew Dillon has initial support in for port multipliers, along with other AHCI work. It’s not ready for production yet, and he lists the various issues going on, including a need for a different way to mount disks – AHCI changes devicenames from ‘ad’ to ‘da’, which can be a hassle.
Update: hot-swap support, too.
Update update: parallel scans for speed.