A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
There’s some more explanations of how disk serial number support is working from Matthew Dillon, plus a warning that a full kernel/world rebuild is needed because of these changes.
If I’m reading it right, serial number support, combined with a dynamic /dev, makes it possible to identify a disk by serial number, assign a name to it, and then refer to that disk directly by name in places like /etc/fstab. Much, much easier than remembering /dev/ad0c or /dev/ad1a, and so on.
DevFS breaks vinum. Will it be fixed? Yes, hopefully very soon.
Preliminary serial number support for drive identification has been added to DragonFly, with /dev/serno listing the appropriate devices and numbers.
DevFS has been added. There’s some issues, each with a workaround. Please test, as it’s certain that a major change like this will cause new problems around video and sound. Once those are fixed, however, device management will be a lot easier.
I published a retention policy for pkgsrc packages. It works out to “current release and last release” for what will be kept as pkgsrc binaries that you can add with pkg_radd. If you need longer-term support, speak up, but I don’t think this will be a problem for anyone.
Want to bring Hammer to Slackware Linux? People want it, and there’s some work already in progress.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been working on an import of gcc 4.4 to DragonFly; it’s not usable yet, but when it is, it means the 3.x gcc code can be dropped.
The web pages on www.dragonflybsd.org now show individual page history through gitweb, and the RecentChanges page will link to diffs for each new edit.
(My apologies for not figuring this out sooner.)
Postgres version 8.1 is going to be removed from pkgsrc soon, since Postgres 8.4 is now available (in general, and in pkgsrc). Speak up on the pkgsrc mailing lists if this is a significant problem for you.
A recent change from Matthew Dillon makes it possible for a NFS client connection to be cleanly re-established after a reboot. Previously, the server would lose track of the client.
Thanks to Xin Li, gzip now supports pack and can unpack archives in that format.
The DevFS Summer of Code project is going into DragonFly this weekend; be ready for surprises if you update. It’s not complete yet; there’s a few more weeks for Summer of Code, but there’s other work that this code will enable.
Sepherosa Ziehau working on merging some of Alexander Polakov’s ACPI work; testers needed. If you have a system that pitches a fit with ACPI enabled, you would make a perfect subject.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2009Q2, is out. The release announcement has details on what’s new.
Peter Avalos has made it possible for TCP buffers to be automatically sized according to need, which improves performance when latency goes up. It’s already in.
The system leaf.dragonflybsd.org, where developer accounts are located, has had a significant bump in CPU and RAM, and has the newest scripts for automated vkernel setup.
As always, leaf accounts are available for anyone who wants to develop something on DragonFly, independent of commit access.
Release 2.3.2 has been tagged, for anyone who wants to stick with DragonFly past the current release but before the recent radical changes to NFS. Check the commit message for a summary of what’s changed since 2.3.1, taken from the commit messages.
Well, default as of the next release. With the recent changes to NFS, TCP will be needed in most circumstances. It’s still possible to force UDP if desired with the ‘mntudp’ option, or ‘udp’ if you’re using a 2.3.x system.
It is now possible to mount a Hammer PFS via NFS, though you’ll want to use NFSv3.
Peter Avalos has updated gzip, with a far longer list of updates than I would have thought possible with a utility that’s been around for a while.