A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
DragonFly versions >=2.6 and ipfw don’t seem to get along for doing network address translations. I’ve posted about this before, but I’m linking again because this time I have the explicit config lines written out.
I should probably create a pf category…
Several Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly have already been claimed and finished – a regression test and desktop documentation, plus others I haven’t been involved in.
The contest runs through January and is open to anyone 13-18, with Google paying per task. Hopefully we’ll have enough tasks to make it the full time, as it’s more popular than I anticipated.
Alex Hornung has added the basic work for dmirror, a software RAID-1 implementation into the tree, along with a concept description from Matthew Dillon. It’s not ready for use yet; ready for development, though.
Siju George noticed that his mouse would stop working in X, perhaps every hour. Restarting X would fix it, but he didn’t have a clear cause. Antonio Huete Jimenez suggested turning the sysctl ‘debug.psm.loglevel’ to 9 to at least see what messages cropped up, and that seemed to fix it. I don’t think it’s a good long-term solution, but it’s worth mentioning in case this odd bug bites someone else.
Please welcome our newest committer: Ilya Dryomov. He’s already responsible for deduplication code for Hammer, so now he can work directly.
Tomas Bodzar found robotpkg, a pkgsrc-based collection of robotics-related software. Because of its pkgsrc origins, it should in theory work with DragonFly, or most anything.
APIC_IO is back as a kernel config option, though it just toggles the sysctl loader tunable default. This is so a kernel config file with that option still set won’t cause an error.
Matthew Dillon’s made several changes to improve support for AMD SB850 chipsets (for AHCI) and also for 880/890 chipsets. If you have one of these systems, it may be bootable/more reliable. Don’t start messing with the hot-plug capability yet, though.
Peter Avalos has committed his speedups for OpenSSL encryption (using assembly), along with a lot of numbers to show performance changes. It’s definitely sped up, but the quantity of values is so large that you’d have to visualize it differently to get a summary I could show here.
If you’re between 12 and 18 years of age, Google Code-In has started. There’s plenty of tasks available for DragonFly BSD, so jump in now! (or, well, wait a few days for the holiday if you’re a U.S. resident.)
Peter Avalos is working on having OpenSSL use assembly code. On i386, he reports initial rough results of blowfish working 15% faster, and DES doubling in speed. (seen via IRC.)
The utility pkg_add has a -u option that tells it to upgrade any existing matched package with a given binary package. Since pkg_radd passes options on to the underlying use of pkg_add, after automatically setting a remote repository for binary files, pkg_radd -u <packagename> tells pkg_add to automatically find and upgrade a package.
I never thought this would work. However, I’m building a package on a system that has pkgsrc-2010Q1 packages installed, but a pkgsrc-2010Q3 /usr/pkgsrc. Every time I’ve encountered an error because installed software was too low a version, pkg_radd -uv <package_name> has resulted in a quick upgrade.
I’m not recommending this as a new upgrade method; I’m noting how unexpectedly well this experiment is going. It may be just blind luck, but this sure would be nice if it ‘just worked’.
Peter Avalos is bringing in OpenSSL 1.0.0b. I’m not sure what the difference between 1.0.0b and 1.0.1 would be. Also, Alex Hornung has updated vn(4) – there’s more updates than the one I linked.
Naoya Sugioka had trouble booting DragonFly on his Dell M4400. He updated ACPICA with this patch, and was able to boot. I link to it in case someone else with a recent Dell model (or perhaps just a laptop with the same chipset?) has the same issues.
Another point release for DragonFly 2.8 is planned, with a bunch of small updates, some of which have been covered here recently.
Jan Lentfer, who apparently has a high tolerance for pain, has now brought the kernel part of pf up to the equivalent of the OpenBSD 4.4 version, available for testing. It’s not yet committed. pfctl’s updated too.
Francois Tigeot was able to get wip/jdk15 to build on DragonFly, from pkgsrc-wip. Unfortunately, the package has been removed, but he’s looking to put it back.
If you have any last-minute suggestions for Google Code-In tasks for DragonFly, pass them along now – it starts Monday! Post them here, or in #dragonflybsd on EFNet IRC, or on the kernel@ mailing list. We have 34 already, but you can never have too many.
A number of people have encountered this: while installing some larger pkgsrc package, the process stops on a strange DocBook error. Alex Hornung has a fix: symlink /usr/pkg/etc/xml/catalog to /usr/pkg/share/xml/catalog.