We’re in the picking and choosing stage of Summer of Code. I posted a note to kernel@ describing the next dates to watch for.
Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.
New builds of dports have been uploaded and updated, for x86_64 and i386. (x86_64 was already done; I linked the note about i386) This means you can change PACKAGESITE in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf to point at LATEST instead of RELEASE and get newer packages. ‘pkg upgrade’ is all it takes, with dports.
The tpm(4) driver has been added by Sascha Wildner, ported from FreeBSD. What’s it do?
From the man page: “The tpm driver provides support for various trusted platform modules (TPM) that can store cryptographic keys.” Crypto keys stored in hardware, where they are in theory unmangleable, instead of on the disk. At least, that’s my impression after 30 seconds of research.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted some numbers showing improvements in ip forwarding rates. He’s done this before, except this time it’s with bnx(4), probably because of his recent commits.
John Marino managed to update GCC from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 (4.7 changelog), zlib from 1.2.7 to 1.2.8 (changelog), and awk from 20110810 to 20121220 (can’t find a changelog).
In other update news, Matt Dillon has been working on HAMMER2’s flush sequencing.
Update: tcsh too.
In the week after DragonFly 3.4 was released, Francois Tigeot was tracking downloads for each type of packaging system. It looks like dports downloads far outnumber pkgsrc. I think there’s reasons it appears different in uptake, but it’s still neat to see people trying the new system.
If you have a sili(4) device, Francois Tigeot needs you to run a particular patch and tell him what happens. He’s testing a larger I/O request size, and wants to see how it will work out “in the field”.
I’ve put the 3.4 release images up on terasaur, a Bittorrent seeding site. Please try pulling them and let me know how it goes. I haven’t torrented many things, so I am unsure how to even verbify “torrent’. Hopefully that sentence and those links work out.
If you’re looking to install DragonFly on a Kimsufi server, and you can read French, this explanation may help you. (via Enjolras on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
If you’ve ever wondered about how you can resize/move a HAMMER filesystem, follow this thread for a variety of answers.
Have you ever wondered about how the booting process works on DragonFly? Well, Ivan Uemlianin did, out loud. Several different recommendations followed, so now you can learn too.
It’s been 2 years since the pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 2.12/2.13 were getting updated, so I am going to remove them. If you’re running DragonFly 2.12, you’ll want to either build from source or upgrade DragonFly.
‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.
John Marino brought up a point every operating system project will have to think about: when does support for i386 (i.e. 32-bit x86 processors) stop? Follow the thread for details. There’s no final answer, yet.
As posted in my email to users@: Version 3.4 of DragonFly is officially out.
The release ISO/IMG files are all available at the usual mirrors:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/mirrors/
The release notes have details on all the changes:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/release34/
If you are planning to try the new dports system for installing third-party software, check the DPorts Howto page:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/howtos/HowToDPorts/
If you have an installed DragonFly 3.2 system and you are looking to upgrade, these (not directly tested) steps should work, as root:
cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4
… And then go through the normal buildworld/buildkernel process found in /usr/src/UPDATING. If you are running a generic kernel, that can be as simple as
make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && make upgrade
(and then reboot)
If you encounter problems, please report them at bugs.dragonflybsd.org. I get better at testing for each release, but I also get better at discovering new problems just after release.
Are you using hotplugd? If you are, this post from ‘william opensource4you’ about a small patch he made may be useful to you.
John Marino has committed updates for libmpfr, diff utils, grep, and libexpat/libbsdxml. Libmpfr, the one item that I suspect doesn’t spring instantly to mind, is a library for floating-point computation.
As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.