DragonFly – Page 133 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/02/272010/02/28

Summer of Code mentors wanted

(reproduced from my email to users@/kernel@)

The application period for Google Summer of Code 2010 starts in about a
week. We were able to enter in 2008 and 2009, so I’m optimistic that we
will get in for 2010 too.

Saying “I’m willing to mentor” doesn’t force you to commit yet; you don’t
have to work with a student on a project you don’t find interesting.
However, mentoring is a multi-week commitment to support a student who may
or may not have the best planning skills – please be ready to help.

I need to know soon how many potential mentors we have since we have to
ask for a given number of slots from Google as part of the application
process. If you are interested in mentoring, speak up here or by email, please. If
there’s a particular project on the GSoC 2010 page that looks interesting,
put your name by it.

http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsoc2010/

2010/02/262010/02/26

Works in progress: wifi, unionfs

There’s several projects in the works:

Rui Paulo is working on an update of wireless device support in DragonFly; Matthew Dillon added libbsdxml to DragonFly as part of the prep work.
Joe Talbott is working on unionfs; Nicolas Thery supplied some links, while Matthew Dillon wants deduplication.

2010/02/25

More SSD deals

For those wanting to try swapcache(8): Newegg has two deals running: a Corsair P128 128GB SATA II SSD for $355 and a Patriot PS-100 2.5″ 64GB SATA I/II SSD for $170. These are probably bigger than what’s needed for using swapcache, but if you’re itching to spend…

2010/02/24

New committer: Samuel J. Greear

Welcome Samuel J. Greear as the newest DragonFly committer; he’s been around the project for a while, but recently became more active.

2010/02/242010/02/24

32 to 64-bit Hammer mirroring fixed

Michael Neumann has fixed the ability to stream Hammer data between 32 and 64 bit systems. However, this is a change to 64-bit systems that requires them to match; make sure that you are not mixing 64-bit systems built before and after this commit on the 21st.

I can’t find the commit message in the mail archive, so I’ll quote it here:

Continue reading “32 to 64-bit Hammer mirroring fixed”

2010/02/23

Swapcache better than expected

As part of a report on the status of swapcache and tmpfs, Matthew Dillon noted that a side effect of using a SSD for swapcache means that disk activity stays efficient, and the wear meter on the SSD is reduced much more slowly than for regular disk use.

2010/02/23

Programs (re)added to x86_64

Antonio Huete Jimenez notes that some programs have been enabled in the x86_64 build; if you’re running bleeding edge 2.5, please try them and see if they work in 64-bit.

2010/02/222010/02/22

aps(4) also added

Constantine A. Murenin has committed support for aps(4). This supports various sensors for disk and mouse activity, and even acceleration sensors.

2010/02/22

igb(4), em(4) testers needed

Michael Neumann has ported igb(4) and em(4), and he needs people with the corresponding hardware to test it. Those are network cards, if you aren’t familiar with those short names.

2010/02/21

Get ready for 2.6

The next release, 2.6, is scheduled for mid-March. Please make sure things are running well, as there’s a lot of new features already ready for this release.

2010/02/21

Choices for swapcache

This one’s a few days old, but I’m still trying to catch up with all the events lately: swapcache now has two flags to control whether just meta-data or all data is cached for any given set of directories; caching everything is only worthwhile if the swapcache device can keep up with the resulting traffic.

This requires a rebuild of world, if you’re running 2.5 bleeding edge.

2010/02/20

Now available: tmpfs

Naoya Sugioka’s tmpfs port is now ready to go. It’s still considered experimental, but it’s worth trying. tmpfs(5) is different because it keeps data in RAM once, and pages out only when needed. This best-case scenario is an improvement to mount_mfs(8) and md(4), its predecessors.

It’s running now on pkgbox64 and already seems to be speeding up the bulk build process.

2010/02/20

More GSoC ideas available for DragonFly

The Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly is growing faster than I expected. If you have an idea (or, even better, want to take on a project assuming we make it into SoC), take a look.

2010/02/19

Dear lazyweb: monitoring software needed

Since I have several machines repeatedly building all of pkgsrc now, I want to monitor RAM, disk I/O, CPU, and the like, and keep historical records. I’ve seen this done with cacti and snmp, and sort of done with nagios.

There must be easier/prettier choices out there. Any suggestions?

2010/02/19

Dragonfly and BSD but not this

It’s that Opera thing again. “Sigh“.

2010/02/19

IGD support added

Matthew Dillon’s added support for IGD chipsets, found in various N450-based netbooks. It was tested on a Gateway LT2104u, for instance. I didn’t realize there still were Gateway computers.

2010/02/19

Binary package updates

I’ve been working toward continuous builds of pkgsrc, so that there’s always up-to-date pkgsrc binaries available. I’ve been posting notes about it too, which I will hopefully be able to automate soon. For example, Firefox 3.5.8, the most recent version, is already available.

2010/02/18

alc(4) driver added

Samuel J. Greear and Matthew Dillon have ported the alc(4) driver, for wired Ethernet. This supports the “Atheros AR8131 PCI Express Gigabit Ethernet controllers and Atheros AR8132 PCI Express Fast Ethernet controllers”.

2010/02/18

Google Summer of Code presentation templates

If you need to talk about/sell the Google Summer of Code idea to people, Google now has a set of templates for GSOC presentations. Use them to drum up interest, or persuade someone to mentor/be a student.

2010/02/162010/02/18

Messylaneous for 2010/02/16

It’s like someone turned on the activity faucet; there’s so much to post about lately!

PkgsrcCon 2010 is May 28th to 30th, in Basel. The date’s been declared, but not much else – yet.
Chunks of KDE in pkgsrc are now updating to the KDE4 versions by default. This only affects pkgsrc-current users, not pkgsrc-2009Q4.
An interesting story about computer manufactuing and MicroSD problems.
In Praise of Online Obscurity – this article makes me think of communities like DragonFly and the other BSDs. In essence, growth causes smaller independent groups to form out of a larger membership, because a social group can only be maintained to a certain size. Perhaps this is why FreeBSD’s evolved a core group, or other groups form, like Wikipedia ‘editors’. (via) I’m catering to my own interests in group dynamics here.
Jan Lentfer’s brought in his hostapd and wpa_supplicant work, mentioned previously.