Matthew Dillon has updated libarchive, including a fix for a recent security issue.
Joe Talbott has added support for tying virtual CPUs (in virtual kernels, naturally) to real CPUs, so that a multiprocessor vkernel will actually use multiple processors.
A big thank you goes out to Peter Avalos, who brought in a large quantity of updates to the ahc(4) driver, originally from FreeBSD. Check this month’s commits to see his name a whole bunch of times. (Someone correct me if I have that man page link wrong.)
Matthew Dillon has added a page to the DragonFly website listing the PGP key for the DragonFly security officer.
Credit goes to Hasso Tepper for recently doing a lot of cleanup in DragonFly’s USB code. This is one of those contributions that should be recognized, though it’s hard to have any one part to link to here. Here’s one commit of many.
It’s a buzzword frenzy! Matthew Dillon has committed work performed by he and Joe Talbott on making virtual kernels able to emulate up to 31 CPUs at a time. This has the side effect of making it almost possible to hot-swap CPUs, easily. Testers wanted.
If you want to experiment, Matthew Dillon has added a little program that tests syslink connectivity. Syslink is the protocol that will be used for communication between DragonFly systems in a cluster. Don’t get too excited – it’s just a test program.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added his patch to allow separate volume control for each application. Also, Hasso Tepper has produced a patch for sound that includes changes taken from FreeBSD 6, which improves device support.
Matthew Dillon asks that 1.9 users test using USB memory devices; he’s recently committed a large number of fixes related to physically removing mounted USB drives. Also, automatically mounting reconnected drives is a small, easy project enabled by this recent work. (See linked article for details.)
Matthew Dillon, while investigating a separate problem, ended up improving the separation between CPUs in a multiprocessor system. The Big Giant Lock is still there, but it’s a move in the right direction.
Matthew Dillon was finally able to reproduce the problems some people with older ATA chipsets would have with the new ATA code; he made some subsequent fixes (working late) along with Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, and it seems the ATA problems are fixed.
Matthew Dillon has changed virtual kernels so that they can be internally restarted or shut down, just like a real system. OMG.
If you are running bleeding edge DragonFly, make sure your next buildworld/buildkernel is a full one. Matthew Dillon has made changes to ccdconfig/vnconfig that require it.
Matthew Dillon was considering completing AMD64 support for the next release, and it looks like he might be starting on it.
 Update: No, that’s disklabel work. Thanks to ‘anonymous’ for indirectly pointing that out.
kern.ipc.nmbufs and kern.ipc.nmbclusters sysctl variables are now read-only, and can only be set at boot. Previously, changing them on a running system would show changed values in any application that reported them, but it wouldn’t actually take effect. If you don’t already change these values, this won’t affect you.
Hasso Tepper passed along word that he has added a more permanent fix for the IPv6 ‘Type 0 routing header‘ bug. The fix has been brought to DragonFly 1.8, 1.6, and 1.4, too.
Sepherosa Ziehau has commited encryption support for 802.11 cards that aren’t ath(4). The commit message goes into far more detail than I can sum up (or understand).
Peter Avalos has updated DragonFly’s One True Awk to the latest version.
Matthew Dillon will be committing his integration of SYSREF and struct vnode this Sunday, 2007/05/06. A side effect of this is dynamic allocation and unallocation of vnodes.
Matthew Dillon has committed a huge update to the system initalization code, which, among other things, allows parallel processes during boot. This means that system initialization can be greatly sped up, which he plans to have working by Monday. (and is already starting on it!)
(Reminds me of my old BeOS/PPC system – a desktop within 10 seconds.)