Matthew Dillon made some major changes to NFS, which have greatly improved speed. He’s also made the clients able to write asychronously, which can overwhelm a server because of this increased throughput. Be careful.
Hey, look at what Michael Neumann’s doing: making Hammer expandable! It will be possible to expand your Hammer volumes while online, even.
(note: it’s experimental; don’t be surprised if it destroys data.)
DragonFly has its first 10G network driver, mxge(4), for the Myricom Myri10GE. Aggelos Economopoulos ported it from FreeBSD. Check his post for notes and credits for the people who helped out.
Michael Neumann has removed the PRISON_ROOT flag, and has changed jail(8) code to use only prison_priv_check() to check for allowed operations. This won’t mean anything from a user standpoint, but it does make programming easier.
pipe(2) is now MPSAFE, meaning it can take advantage of multiple processors without the Giant Lock. Matthew Dillon published some before-and-after stats in his commit.
Alexander Polakov has ported the ae(4) network driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; it’s committed now. This device is common in some (many?) Asus Eee devices.
The kernel option PCI_MAP_FIXUP has been removed as of July 11th; if you’re upgrading past that point, make sure to remove that option.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org has a fresh set of pkgsrc-current binary packages for 2.2.1 located at http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages/DragonFly-2.2/pkgsrc-current/. I’ll start a pkgsrc-2009Q2 build momentarily – the pkgsrc-2009Q2 build will become ‘stable’.
The short summary: everyone passed. Yay!
5 weeks to finish!
The in-progress code for the Summer of Code project ‘DragonFly on AMD64’ has been imported; you can now build for SMP on AMD64, and complete a installworld/buildworld, natively. Modules don’t (yet) compile…
Virtual kernels are now SMP by default on DragonFly, even if you don’t have multiple processors/cores.
Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to version 1.0.0 and tcpdump to 4.0.0. (tcpdump site) I’d guarantee that having at least a passing familiarity with tcpdump will eventually, someday, solve an otherwise intractable problem for you.
Threading libraries libc_r and libthread_xu have been synchronized by Hasso Tepper; this shouldn’t cause noticeable issues. The potential issues he mentions for pkgsrc appear fixed, as I haven’t had any significant trouble (from that, at least) during bulk builds.
Alex Hornung is looking for suggestions on the userland tool(s) for his devfs project. This is a Google Summer of Code project, and I’m a bit late posting this, so hurry if you want to get your two cents in.
The binary pkgsrc packages I had on avalon.dragonflybsd.org for 2.3.1 are removed; I had mixed an old and new libc on the build system. (Sorry!) I’ll have new ones based on pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release very soon.
There’s going to be a lot of kernel structure changes this week, as Matthew Dillon works on making more system parts multiprocessor-safe. Rebuild everything including your kernel, if you’re running bleeding edge DragonFly.
EuroBSDCon 2009 is happening the 18th through 20th of September, in Cambridge, UK. There’s usually at least 2-3 DragonFly folks showing up at these – anyone planning to go?
Sascha Wildner has made it possible to include “other” compilers (meaning not GCC) in DragonFly’s build system. His post has additional details.
If you’re a student or mentor for Google Summer of Code, all midterm surveys have to be done by tomorrow, the 13th, at 12:00 PDT. Please do it if you haven’t – payment depends on participation.