A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you want to boot from a Hammer 2 /boot volume, you now can. Hammer 1 never worked well as /boot, though it was technically possible. Hammer 2 will be just fine.
Note that you can’t turn on recently-added disk compression since the bootloader doesn’t understand it, and Hammer 2 is not ready for anything but being worked on. Don’t try it unless you’re ready to be submitting code changes to fix Hammer2.
When Sepherosa Ziehau decides to improve something, he goes all out. For example, he recently improved the mxge(4) driver for Myricom 10G network cards – which is for relatively older hardware – and improved performance by 150Mbps.
This will not be a surprise to anyone seeing the work being done, but: All 5 DragonFly/Summer of Code students for 2013 passed, as noted today in emails from Google. It was possibly our best year yet in terms of buckling down and just plain working.
More Summer of Code wrapups: Larisa Grigore has posted a final report on SysV IPC work, and Mihai Carabas has posted his on hardware support for vkernels.
(Mihai’s report was out several days ago and I didn’t realize it, sorry!)
Francois Tigeot posted his work on the KMS driver for Radeon video cards. He’s looking for help since he’s low on time for the immediate future, and this is a project that could benefit everyone. (Well, everyone with the right video card.)
Joris GIOVANNANGELI and Pawel Dziepak both have published final reports for this year’s DragonFly/Summer of Code experience. Both of them say they want to keep working on DragonFly, which is exactly the result I want. There may be more if the other students have time. A final report wasn’t required, but it is good feedback.
Related: Joris is working on Capsicum for DragonFly and published an API document describing how it has worked/will work.
Please welcome our newest committers: Joris Giovannangeli and Mihai Carabas. Joris has already updated bc(1) and dc(1) to match what OpenBSD has. You may recognize Joris’s name from his just-finished Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly, and Mihai Carabas from both this year’s and last year’s Summer of Code.
Matthew Dillon’s committed the work by Daniel Flores on Hammer 2 compression and Mihai Carabas’s vkernel hardware support – both Summer of Code projects. There’s a good amount of detail in the commit messages describing the work and what it changed; I expect more Summer of Code work to be getting committed…
Note: you’ll want to do a full update.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has added a new rconfig script that automatically mirrors the installed disks with ccd(4). You don’t remember what to do with rconfig(8)? Automatically (and headlessly) install DragonFly, of course! There’s already other examples – they’re just shell scripts.
I put together a list of what I’m thinking could be in the next DragonFly release. Going by our regular schedule, that’s a bit more than a month off. Of note: Summer of Code material and defaulting to dports. Follow the thread for more.
Francois Tigeot wrote up a summary of DragonFly’s support for newer Intel video chipsets. (short summary: much better recently) KMS support is now the default in DragonFly. There’s still work ongoing.
DragonFly has two included compilers – GCC 4.4, and GCC 4.7. Traditionally, we switch from one compiler to the other as default, and then replace the old one with a newer release, and so on.
Until recently, dports built almost exclusively using GCC 4.4. John Marino’s switching to GCC 4.7, for a variety of reasons he lists in a recent post to users@. An interesting point that he raises: GCC 4.4 won’t necessarily be replaced with a newer GCC, but perhaps clang?
We’re in the last week of what has been a very good Summer of Code for DragonFly, and here’s the last reports. (We’re missing two, but this is cleanup week, so not much to report)
I know this is late; my schedule is a bit messed up. This is the penultimate week!
It’s now possible to use systat(1) to see per-connection speeds and pftop status, thanks to Matthew Dillon.
I’m just going to roll all these updates from Sepherosa Ziehau together into one post, because it’s a lot: He’s updated igb(4) to 2.3.10, updated em(4) to 7.3.8, merged the hardware abstraction layer of those two drivers, enabled TSO on all PCI-E em(4) chipsets, and added support for a whole slew of Realtek chipsets in the re(4) driver. Whew!
If you’ve got a MCP79 NVIDA-chipset board, Sascha Wildner’s commit of Ed Berger’s port from OpenBSD has you covered.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has committed his work on “dirfs”, a filesystem that lets you mount directories from your host machine within the running vkernel environment. It’s a sort of shared folders for vkernels. See the commit message for usage details.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made a number of improvements to TCP in DragonFly – specifically, nonblocking and blocking connect(2) performance. See each of his commits for statistics on how much this has reduced processor use under high load. He has also written up an extensive description of how all this TCP stuff works in DragonFly.
In similar news, he has a nginx patch that delivers a significant performance increase. It may go into nginx itself.