Matthew Dillon set up a git copy of the pkgsrc repository some time ago. However, it’s had syncing problems, and there’s an ‘official’ pkgsrc git repository now which does not have the problems. You can still pull from the same place, but it’s the ‘master’ branch now. His heads-up message describes how to switch.
Venkatesh Srinivas has quoted a good phrase to sum up the work he and Matthew Dillon are doing to remove the Big Lock: ‘Less Lock, More Rock’
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.
Looking for DragonFly BSD in Google will occasionally turn up wierd things: the release ISOs scattered amongst other not-so-free software, or poorly cut-and-pasted documentation in a splog. This is the oddest recently: a direct copy of the Wikipedia page on DragonFly, placed on Facebook, with a big tag at the top saying “Sign up for Facebook to connect with DragonFly BSD”.
Except there’s no DragonFly on Facebook. I assume it’s a group formed by some Facebook user. The whole “sign up to connect” item rankles me a bit; signing up for Facebook isn’t going to get you more DragonFly; it’s just going to waste your time.
Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.
Matthew Dillon’s outlined the exact steps for converting to coarse locking, and he’s looking for volunteers to convert files, according to the guidelines he described. If you’re looking for maybe two hours of work that would make a big difference, here’s your chance.
Matthew Dillon’s made changes again that require a full world and kernel rebuild, if you’re following the bleeding edge. There’s also discussion of the underlying principles of the token-based multiprocessor work he’s planning.
They may be low, but Sascha Wildner has documented them.
(I am making a joke that probably only makes sense to native English speakers. Sorry.)
If you’re running DragonFly 2.7, you will need to do a full rebuild on your next update. Matthew Dillon has made some changes because of his lwkt_token work. Making parts of DragonFly subsystems multi-processor safe should be much easier now.
Jan Lentfer has committed ldns and drill to DragonFly, in (unlikely) chance that you managed to delete BIND from pkgsrc (installed by default on 2.7+) and somehow couldn’t replace it.
There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
Joe Talbott wants to write DragonFly/BSD drivers for a whole slew of wireless devices. These are also all the adapters he doesn’t physically have. You can fix this by purchasing something off that page, which will ship right to him. A bwi(4) driver is next, for instance.
www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.
Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.
Aggelos Economopoulos posted more details on his event tracing library, accompanied by a rash of commits. He’s interested in feedback.
Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.