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DragonFly 3.4 branched

DragonFly 3.4 is branched –  as a release candidate, with the current target for 3.4.0 release as the weekend of April 13-14.  See the tagging commit note for a list of all the commit messages.

Note that in previous releases, we tagged “x.y.0” on branch, and “x.y.1” on release.  I’m now tagging “x.y.0rc” for the release candidate at branch time, and we’ll tag with a more normal (to my ears) “x.y.0” for the release.

If you build a 3.4.0rc image right now, you’ll get an older quarterly release of pkgsrc.  That’ll be changed tomorrow as the DragonFly pkgsrc git source is updated and I change where 3.4’s  /usr/Makefile points.

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pkgsrc-2013Q1 announced, with extras

The 2013Q1 branch of pkgsrc has been announced.  Along with the normal quarterly material, there’s several notes: preliminary Cygwin support is present, ruby 1.8 will be retired in favor of 1.9 after this release, and the pkgsrc.org web page now has a very nice new look and logo.

I plan to branch DragonFly 3.4 very soon, and that version will have 2013Q1 as default.

Update: The 2013Q1 branch should be available by tomorrow on DragonFly’s git; the repository needs to update and convert from NetBSD’s CVS and that takes a little time.  I’ll post when it’s ready.

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A short npf note

NetBSD is using/will be using? ‘npf’, a new version of pf similarly-named-but completely-different firewall from pf.  Hubert Feyrer put together a bunch of links talking about it.  I link this because DragonFly is using a version of pf equivalent to what OpenBSD 4.8, and there’s been some discussion of what to do next; it appears FreeBSD and NetBSD are forking off separately from OpenBSD’s version.

Update: npf and pf share 2 letters in the name and nothing else, as Joerg told me – corrected.

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Mailing lists interruption

There’s an as-yet-undiagnosed problem with the @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists; you won’t see any mail from them right now.  I don’t have an ETA for a fix because I don’t know the underlying cause yet…

Update: Fixed; I think – dragonflybsd.org DNS server was not responding, and it had a ripple effect.

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Another sh(1) update

Peter Avalos has committed another batch of updates to sh(1), from FreeBSD.  I was going to comment on how strange it was to see software getting updated so many years later; you’d think everything there was to update for /bin/sh had been done at this point.  Digging casually, the oldest bit on sh that I can find is from 1991 – 22 years old.   The man page mentions a rewrite in 1989 based on System V Release 4 UNIX, and there were versions of sh all the way back to version 1.

Here’s a trivia question – what’s the oldest Unix utility, and what’s the oldest code still in use?  I don’t know the answer.

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Patch cross-pollination

I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD.  FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors.  It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.

As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.

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3 very different commits

Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:

  1. Peter Avalos upgraded libarchive in DragonFly to 3.1.2, with a note of the changes.  An ordinary and appreciated update.
  2. Sascha Wildner updated the ISO639 file to include the newest update: “Standard Moroccan Tamazight”.  There’s no particular utility to that; I just like saying “Standard Moroccan Tamazight” out loud.
  3. Work on poudriere, the utility for bulk-building DPorts packages, has caused some nice speedups for DragonFly in extremely stressful situations.  See one of Matthew Dillon’s recent commits.

I really wish the other BSD projects would include commit lines in the mail message subjects, so it was easier to catch things like these.

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Read shortcut, buffer cache improvements

The new vm.read_shortcut option has been turned on by default by Matthew Dillon, which should lead to some performance improvements.  That improvement has been measured for tmpfs, at least.  There’s also some buffer cache improvments that help on x86_64 systems, too.

Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out, tmpfs also no longer uses the mplock, so it’ll take better advantage of multiple processors.