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.
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.