The ‘poweroff’ command, the equivalent of ‘halt -p’, has been added based on a suggestion from Robin Hahling.
Matthew Dillon has gone after reducing contention and improving SMP performance as vigorously as possible, using dports builds on a 48-processor machine as a test. The machine’s building more than 1000 packages an hour, last I saw on IRC.
John Marino has updated ldns and drill to version 1.6.16.
Chris Turner was curious about clock skew when running under a VM, and Sepherosa Ziehau very kindly explained the different types of internal clock for DragonFly, and how to control them – a topic I’ve never understood deeply.
Matthew Dillon was using poudriere, the dports build tool, on a 48-core system. Poudriere was building all 20,000+ dports, so the machine was quite busy. He decided to get rid of as much contention as possible, and he’s listed all the ways DragonFly’s been streamlined by these efforts. We need to revisit some of our previous benchmarks…
There is a search plugin for Mozilla that searches DragonFly man pages. (Thanks Samuel Greear)
I stole Sepherosa Ziehau’s email subject for the title of this post, because that’s exactly what has happened. Gigabit networking cards under DragonFly will perform very well under extreme load – all of them.
As a followup to news that the git feed of pkgsrc through dragonflybsd.org is not being updated, Max Herrgard wrote out how to fetch pkgsrc via CVS, or tarball, or another git feed. CVS is still the ‘official’ way.
Matthew Dillon’s been working to make huge parallel software builds (i.e. dports) go a bit faster, so watch out. This only affects you if you are running DragonFly 3.5, of course.
The pkgsrc repository in git for DragonFly is currently frozen. This is because many people have switched over to dports, and also because it’s a lot of work to keep it functional. If you do want to pull newer pkgsrc material, use cvs and grab it from a NetBSD server.
As the message notes, don’t go switching to DragonFly-current right now, cause there’s a lot of new material in there and it may not be quite safe. (There’s an ABI change that will require all new builds of your ports, for instance.)
If you’re watching for a certain event, dmesg(8) on DragonFly now has a -f flag that will display new output as it’s logged, sort of like ‘tail -f’.
The Radeon KMS driver from FreeBSD has been imported to DragonFly by Francois Tigeot. It still has problems with ttm, but don’t let that stop you from taking advantage of it.
While looking for a different bug, Matthew Dillon made some changes in the way memory usage is totaled in DragonFly. You’ll see this most when using ‘systat -vm 1’ or ‘vmstat’, probably.
Google has a post up about the 10th anniversary of Summer of Code, with next year’s version of the event getting some changes – an increase in the students allocated and in the student stipend, and more events. I’m planning to apply for DragonFly, for 2014.
Google is also doing the Code-In, for 13 to 17-year-old students, again. DragonFly participated in the first year (the only BSD to do so), but sat out last year. I’m not currently anticipating DragonFly being involved for 2013, cause of reasons. (It’s a lot of work!)
John Marino has accomplished the major task of updating gdb/kgdb, to version 7.6.1 for DragonFly.
Franco Fichtner recently received commit rights for DragonFly. This is so he could import mdocml, a OpenBSD-originating replacement for groff and man page display. Mdocml has been mentioned before on the Digest, and there’s a downloadable book. (See the more-interesting-than-it-sounds History of UNIX Manpages there too, but I digress.)
One advantage of using mdocml, as I understand it, is that groff is no longer required to view man pages. The only thing left in DragonFly that required a C++ compiler was groff. So, rebuilding could be a bit faster, and a bit less complicated.
Here’s the part that makes me happy: Changes made in DragonFly promptly made it back into NetBSD’s mdocml. Other changes rolled from DragonFly back into OpenBSD, too, and mdocml is in FreeBSD 10, though I don’t have a src change to point at right now. It all circled back around to DragonFly, too. It’s really neat to have a BSD-grown cross-BSD product.
(Incidentally, if you have a Thinkpad and keyboard issues, Franco has a patch for you to try.)
I had this to post, and managed to miss it: Daniel Flores, whose Summer of Code project was Hammer compression, posted a final report.
I know I said Summer of Code was complete for DragonFly, but Larisa Grigore published some rough benchmarks of her “SysV IPC in userland” work, plus a followup.
DragonFly has generally shifted over to dports for 3rd-party software management, away from pkgsrc. Because of that, I haven’t been building binary packages of the quarterly pkgsrc releases. Pierre Abbat asked why on users@, and here’s my explanation of the change.
John Marino has put in a large patch to DragonFly 3.5, updating all sorts of language-related items. As he warns, you will need a full buildworld/buildkernel in a specific order to update. On the plus side, you can now probably use your native language for nvi and for git.