A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Sascha Wildner has changed the default compiler to gcc 4.4. See his commit notes for some details. To my knowledge, we’re the only BSD using this recent a version.
A full buildworld/buildkernel is probably the best strategy. I’ll be rebuilding all the pkgsrc packages for 2.9 using gcc 4.4… This will take at least a week.
I forgot to mention it when I did this opening night, but: DragonFly’s application to Google Summer of Code 2011 is in. We find out if we’re accepted on the 18th.
If you’re curious, I have a bulk build on DragonFly 2.9/x86_64/pkgsrc-current finished. Work on the programs that don’t build is always welcome. It’s pretty good for bleeding-edge, though!
… is to make its patches unnecessary, by getting the changes needed for any program to compile on DragonFly built right into the program. (Often called “pushing patches upstream”) That usually means creating a patch and then tracking down the program authors to get them to include those changes in the next release of a project. That tracking down can be a majority of the work. In that case: thanks, Rumko!
Update: Also, thanks, Matthias Rampke! He did the same thing for pcc.
It’s not even released yet, but John Marino and Sascha Wildner have been laying the foundation for using gcc 4.6 in DragonFly. gcc 4.6 looks to have some new things in it; more Objective-C support and Go, too, based on my quick perusal of the gcc website.
“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting. Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year. It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.
Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!
I’ve linked to it before, but it’s expanded since: the Google Summer of Code projects page on dragonflybsd.org has a whole lot of ideas listed. Please add to it, especially if there’s a project you’d like to be doing. (Here’s more thoughts, for example.)
Stéphanie Ouillon expressed interest in the virtio drivers as a Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly; Aggelos Economopoulos followed up with an explanation of the various work that’s been done, and further resources. I chimed in with my usual warning.
Sascha Wildner’s removed the meteor(4) code because it apparently no longer builds, and it’s unlikely anyone uses an actual video board that requires this driver, at this point. If you do, speak up.
Matthew Dillon’s improved bridging to the point where you can now modify the MAC address of the bridge and most everything, including ARP, will come from it correctly. It’s even possible to bond 2 or more interfaces together, with the side effect of dragonflybsd.org having a lot more bandwidth.
Update: the config for his bonded interfaces has been posted as an example.
Update 2: More notes here.
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
Matthew Dillon has continued his bridge work, with another commit adding various features. Go, read.
Venkatesh Srinivas did a comparison of the default scheduler in DragonFly with the “fairqueue” scheduler, using Interbench, the “interactivity benchmark”. The numbers don’t show a deficit relative to either side, which is OK I guess? I’m not sure how to analyze it.
I posted before about a move to use AT&T’s U-Verse fiber/DSL product for dragonflybsd.org’s connection. It led Matt Dillon to try to add features to compensate for the service’s shortcomings, but it’s still problematic. He’s written up just how broken U-Verse is, calling it “almost a complete failure” as a business connection. The bulk of the problems seem to come from the 2Wire DSL modem supplied by AT&T.
Remember when the Internet used to be the place to find long technical writeups of a product directly from people who were using it? Much of that has disappeared into comment forms and ephemeral Facebook posts. That’s too bad.
You can probably infer the new (to me) blog I found this week from some of the links…
Matthew Dillon has added transparent bridging, mostly to overcome issues with the AT&T DSL modem he’s using. With this non-default feature, IP packets retain the original MAC address when retransmitted through a new interface.
The dragonflybsd.org sites (well, www anyway) are getting a new network connection, so expect a bit of downtime due to the transition.
For those of you thinking of IPv6 (and you should be), Matthias Rampke reported good luck with an IPv6 tunneling service. He points out that the /48 address he now has at home is larger than the entire IPv4 network.
The virtio network drivers for DragonFly (mentioned previously here, here, and here) went away. Apparently the original FreeBSD code was not supposed to be available publicly, under a BSD license, and it’s having a knock-on effect for DragonFly and probably NetBSD.
(virtio drivers, if this is an unfamiliar term, are for devices in virtual environments, as when DragonFly is running under VMWare or something similar.)
February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.