Due to a crash yesterday on git.dragonflybsd.org, the Git repo was not up to date, briefly. It’s been fixed. This will only really matter if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly and rebuilt your system in the last 24 hours or so.
I’ve had the bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 finish on 2.9 systems, for i386 and for x86_64. The uploads for 2.9/x86_64 seem to have completed…
‘file’ has been updated to version 5.05 by Peter Avalos. file(1) is one of those utilities that I forget is a contributed, external piece of software, even though it’s been in Unix since 1973.
(file is one year older than me!)
Sourceforge had/has a security problem, so they’ve turned off some services until it’s fixed. However, anything planning to download from Sourceforge will be affected, so some packages in pkgsrc may not be able to build for … a day or two?
Tim Bisson posted new network tests contrasting the virtio driver against emulated re(4) in virtual environments. Previously, the virtio driver performed worse, but a more developed test suite seems to deliver more positive results.
Samuel J. Greear has written a summary of DragonFly’s experience with Google Code-In 2011, noting that the students tacked harder projects than expected, and relatively easy documentation projects were less popular than expected. He has hard numbers on tasks done, too.
I think this article holds the “number of hyphens in a title” record for this blog.
The pkgsrc-2010Q4 branch is now available in DragonFly’s git repo, via ‘git checkout pkgsrc-2010Q4’ in /usr/pkgsrc. Enjoy!
Google Summer of Code is happening again! (FAQ, timeline) Of course, DragonFly will be applying to participate as a mentoring organization again this year. The last several years have all been fruitful with completed projects and new developers, so it’s worth the effort.
Tim Bisson and others put together a virtual network driver for DragonFly, based on FreeBSD’s version. Strangely, the emulated re(4) driver performed better, though their initial test was pretty minimal. The already existing DragonFly virtual block device driver is still based on NetBSD’s version. There are some positive side effects from bringing in this work, in any case.
Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to get rid of ipfilter. It’s one of 3 firewall-ish programs in DragonFly right now, along with ipfw and pf. Currently, pf is getting the most attention with Jan Lentfer’s porting work, though npf is also on the horizon. However, ipfilter is currently in use at nfrance.com, so its removal may be on hold until it can be shown that ipfw or pf can stand in for it. It looks like it will work out.
Here’s where the binary build is: summarized in a post to users@. So far so good…
Global tokens are now running without the giant lock in DragonFly. Neat! There’s still plenty more to remove, but this is a big step.
Sascha Wildner set most of userland to compile with the gnu99 standard (though gnu89 is still used for contrib/ and some other parts). What’s this mean? Userland code now can match the ISO C99 standard, along with the GNU extensions that go with it.
(I missed this when it actually happened. Sorry!)
James Polera found that M5 Hosting was willing to install a DragonFly server for hosting, in addition to their other BSD/Linux offerings. Their service was also apparently excellent.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, is back up at a new location, with new disks and new connectivity. pkg_radd should work by default again, as should git.dragonflybsd.org.
Here’s the state of my build of pkgsrc-2010Q4 packages:
- DragonFly 2.8/i386 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.8/x86_64 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.9/i386 – just started (happens on Avalon)
- DragonFly 2.9/x86_64 – in progress
So it will be some days yet… building over 4000 packages total is never quick.
If you’re using pkgin for managing pkgsrc packages, there’s a new bugfix to cover scenarios where there’s an old and new version dependency on the same item, like php between versions 5.2 and 5.3. It’s described in French, or translated English. (Thanks, Antonio Huete)