The hammer command now has an ‘info’ option, which gives a great deal of information on your Hammer drives, thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez. (Committed)
Hasso Tepper has some things he’d like to see for the next release, and he put them together in a wish list. His hands are full with pkgsrc, but if any of these projects look interesting to you, now is a good time to take advantage of the delay before the next release. (there’s already some work done.)
This blog post talks about the identified reasons Ubuntu has been so successful in growth over the past few years. The post uses it as a comparison to Perl, but it holds some lessons for DragonFly. Some items we have now – a Live CD, simple install, regular release schedule – and they’ve been very useful.
On the other hand, the available applications is something that can improve – as nice as it it to build from source, immediate installation of binaries is best. Heck, some companies base their business around it. Pkgsrc is getting closer to creating an “app store” for DragonFly. We’ve got a civil community, but I’d like to figure out ways to make it even more accessible.
(Nobody mentions this when talking about Ubuntu’s success, but having a large, privately-funded company backing your open source project also helps.)
While on the subject, I would love to have a job like Jono Bacon’s. He works with all the issues that I think about.
Dennis Melentyev was trying out AHCI support, and as part of that process, Matthew Dillon described the steps needed to deal with disk renaming issues that can come from a NATA -> AHCI switch. This isn’t needed for most people right now, but I wanted to link to it just in case someone hits that moment of panic.
Matthew Dillon fixed a problem with AHCI on July 2nd. If you are running AHCI from before that date with a port multiplier, you may want to update. Further tests have completed without issues.
Alexander Polakov has put together an update of PCI bus and ACPI interrupt handling code taken mostly from FreeBSD, and ported it to DragonFly. Please try it out – if you previously had booting issues with DragonFly, this may have cured them.
Firefox 3.5, which is in pkgsrc-wip, is working on DragonFly. There’s some HTML% audio/video problems that can be attributed to the somewhat stale OSS code in Firefox; if you can contribute a fix, please do.
Matthew Dillon is shifting the semiannual release schedule over by two months; new releases of DragonFly will happen in March and September. The current July-December releases hit right on major (U.S.) holidays and too close to quarterly pkgsrc releases.
The message linked above also contains a list of the surprisingly large quantity of work that will go into the next release, plus some details on booting strategies going forward.
I’m copying pkgsrc packages to avalon.dragonflybsd.org that were built on a 2.3.1 DragonFly system; if you’re running a 2.3.1 or more recent DragonFly setup, pkg_radd should pull right from this, once the 8G of files finish copying over.
The Google Summer of Code midterms are almost upon us. Starting July 6th (that’s next Monday), students and mentors will need to fill out a survey detailing how the project is going. There’s a preliminary version at Google Docs, so you know what to expect when they go up on the GSoC site. They will have to be completed by the 13th.
If you’re a student: make sure you have code that shows progress. If you’re behind schedule, cram.
If you’re a mentor: make sure you are aware of your student’s progress. If the student’s behind schedule, help them cram.
Sascha Wildner has added an option to the installer to create a UFS boot and Hammer volume as an install disk, in addition to the all-Hammer and all-UFS options already available. Programs expecting the booting kernel to be on UFS will be able to find it, but users still get the benefits of Hammer.
Updated: It replaces the all-Hammer option. Thanks for the correction, Sascha!
Matthew Dillon has a new version of Hammer, which speeds up listings from programs like ‘ls -la’ and ‘find’. This is only in 2.3.1.x code right now, so don’t force an upgrade via hammer version-upgrade if you’re still on DragonFly 2.2. His post includes some benchmarks.
On a side note: sili(4) tests look good.
As Jim Chapman found out, dump only works for UFS, and not for Hammer. Matthew Dillon outlined the different mirroring and snapshot methods that Hammer makes available.
I’ve heard of Dvorak keyboard layouts, but I didn’t know there’s another, called Colemak. Sascha Wildner has committed a patch from Geert Hendrickx which makes Colemak layouts available on DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon has changed the way USB flash drives are attached, to make sure they don’t interfere with AHCI-attached disks. This is temporary, and will be replaced by a dynamic /dev.
Siju George described his efforts to set up a continuous, automatic backup system using Hammer, with some interesting results. Matthew Dillon chimed in with some suggestions.
Matthew Dillon is looking for one more driver to build to complement the AHCI and Sili drivers. There’s several suggestions already.
Matthew Dillon’s made some small changes to Hammer; it should result in a small speedup when copying data.
It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for a digression. This blog post from Matt Trout describes a lot of the code work he’s done for Perl, and what he thinks the best contribution is. The important part is the end of the post. He notes that for all the code he’s added, the best return has come from encouraging others to contribute. The net result has been a magnification of effort, as more people donate time.
The reason I’m posting this is to note that DragonFly, as a community, has been excellent so far at providing a low-drama environment for people to have ideas and contribute work. Keep this in mind; the best benefit to DragonFly isn’t lines of code, but people welcomed.
‘Haidut’ brings word of a 50-system DragonFly installation acting as web crawlers, with performance exceeding that of the Debian Linux systems they replaced. There’s more details about what’s being run, if you’re curious.