DragonFly now uses Redmine for bugs.dragonflybsd.org. This means that the bugs@ and submit@ lists have can still be read by anyone, but to post a new bug or patch, or reply, you need to be registered on the bug tracker itself. You don’t have to be subscribed to the mailing list to use the web interface. See the bugs@ and submit@ announcements for other details.
The man page for dfregress has been put together, and you can read it and find out how to contribute, right now.
(That man page should be up by the time this is posted…)
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado has been working with clang and DragonFly, along with Sascha Wildner. DragonFly mostly compiles using clang, with lib/citrus being (the only? one of?) the last holdouts. Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado detailed how to test it out using clang 3.0 in case someone else wants to help solve this.
If you’re tracking DragonFly current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update. Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes in route(8) that a quickworld will not catch.
The two things that make my day! The work on DragonFly-current has led to some significant speed improvements. So good, that Samuel Greear’s post on OSNews.org links to graphed results from him and from Francois Tigeot (multi-page PDF) showing the results from pgbench.
The results show a jump in multi-core/processor numbers that vastly exceeds DragonFly 2.10’s performance, and is comparable to FreeBSD 9/10. Here’s some of what did it.
Alex Hornung has created ‘dfregress’, a test framework designed to be as simple as possible for adding tests to DragonFly. This would make it easier to verify an upcoming release is correct, for instance. See his commit note for extensive details, and add a trivial test for anything you value.
This is another one of those features that I bet goes away, and nobody would notice because nobody uses it any more. Sascha Wildner has removed AppleTalk from DragonFly.
The host leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been upgraded to new hardware. This is the machine used for anyone who wants to develop on DragonFly, so there’s a good performance boost there for developers. It also hosts bugs.dragonflybsd.org, which should be working again soon.
DragonFly has a new memory allocator, called (not surprisingly) “dmalloc“. It’s only present on x86_64, not i386, because it could eat up more VSZ (virtual memory) than an i386 kernel may have available.
The presence of /usr/include/crypt.h in DragonFly (starting in December 2010) meant that some programs compiled during that time will expect that file to always be there. It was recently removed, so any programs compiled in that timeframe will also need to be recompiled. Right now, this affects you only if you are running DragonFly 2.13 , since that’s the only place crypt.h was removed. This may be an issue for the release, but we’ll worry about that when we get there… I’m kicking off new 2.13 bulk builds now.
There’s a new page up on the DragonFly website, about using rpkgmanager to manage your pkgsrc-installed packages.
In DragonFly, there’s only a few places C++ is used. If you wanted to make sure DragonFly was pure C, Samuel Greear lists those remaining nooks and crannies.
You can now have, in theory, up to 32 terabytes of RAM on your 64-bit DragonFly system, from a change made by Matthew Dillon. I’m curious to see if anyone has even 1 terabyte, as that’s at least feasible.
John Marino added tuning support within GCC 4.4 for the Geode CPU. Waaaay back when, these were x86 -compatible Cyrix chips. Nowadays I think they are most common in single–board computers.
Some cleanup in the CVS -> git process wasn’t happening, so if you have been using pkgsrc 2011Q3 from git (i.e. via make in /usr), re-pull to make sure you have everything.
(The post noting this seems to have been eaten by the mailarchive… that’ll be replaced.)
There’ll be some brief outages this week as a few of the dragonflybsd.org machines are upgraded. The new machines will be 64-bit DragonFly, and have 16G of RAM. RAM is crazy cheap these days. I’m continually dumbfounded by it.
A bumper crop of articles to read this week.
- Ruby went to a BSD license. That’s nice to see. Commence licensing argument in 3… 2…
- DragonFly BSD on Ohloh hasn’t been updated in months – it should be noticing new commits automatically. Don’t know why. Any more vigorous users of Ohloh that know why?
- “Which OSS clustered file system should I use?” The commenters point out something that many people mix up: RAID redundancy is not backups.
- I always enjoy accounts of completely ineffective break-in attempts.
- In praise of “crap” technology. I must admit, I love just looking at stuff like what Brando sells, or various surplus sites. It’s never high-end fancy, but that is part of the appeal, as the linked article notes.
- Think of this speech the next time someone asks you for help online, no matter how accessible the answer.
- 20 years of Vim. Vim started on the Amiga, of all places. That would make vi itself about eleventy kajillion years old. Does it predate the release of 1BSD? I don’t know. Looking at a BSD family tree to see what I could learn, I also found that QNX was originally QUNIX. I didn’t know that either. Everything leads back to UNIX, really. I look forward to Jeremy C. Reed’s book about this early history…
- This electronic music site entertains me, for it is also available in amber. (You have to have seen monochrome monitors circa 1982 or so to understand…)
- Speaking of 1982, you may enjoy Nintendo Legend, CRPG Addict, and Blogging Ultima. (via trevorjk on #dragonflybsd IRC)
Random unrelated link for the week: “War Photographer“. This animation makes me so happy.
This recent structure change (are there others like this? Maybe?) means that existing binaries may need to be recompiled for anyone tracking DragonFly master. This probably means that an upgrade from 2.10 to 2.12 will require rebuilds of all binary pkgsrc packages.
Well, they’re still available, but you don’t want them in your config any more because they can slow you down. This will only affect you if you are running binary files from DragonFly 1.2 or earlier, or… I guess a 4.3 BSD binary? From 1986? I’m sure there’s some other reason for it to be there.