David Shao posted a nice writeup of what works and what does not for DragonFly as a desktop, from pkgsrc. It actually sounds pretty good other than issues with a recent cairo update that I think affected multiple platforms.
I recreated the by-month thread and date listing from the old mailing lists, but for Mailman. It’s at lists.dragonflybsd.org.
Debian squished with DragonFly, sorta like Debian/kFreeBSD? Don’t know if it will work, but what the heck.
As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd. That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too. It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages. 3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.
John Marino has accomplished the difficult task of putting gcc 4.7 into DragonFly. Version 4.4 is still the default, and the older 4.1 version has been disabled. If you want to try this newer version, setting WORLD_CCVER=gcc47 will build kernel and world that way too. If you’re curious about what’s different in this version of gcc, there’s a 4.7 changelog.
Are we the only BSD with this new a version in base? I think so.
P.S.: You’ll want to do a full buildworld if you’re running DragonFly 3.1
P.P.S.: you may need to put ‘NO_GCC47=true’ in make.conf, going from IRC comments.
P.P.P.S.: Nope, now it’s fine.
The machine that runs www.dragonflybsd.org and bugs.dragonflybsd.org is currently down. While it gets figured out, Alex Hornung has a static copy of the dragonflybsd.org main website available.
It’s been an extremely busy week for me, but I still have a batch of links here.
- Thomas Klausner sent a link to some very pretty images of real dragonflies.
- Datacenter details, from Metafilter. I’ve been in places like that, and so has my brother.
- Bug report humor. (related to Ubuntu ads, previously linked here.)
- Sometimes this site/my domain gets weird spam. I got different versions of this SEO spam recently. No story here, just a thing that I’ve seen others fall for.
- Honoring Bill Moggridge. He designed the first laptop, pictured in that article. It looks like my memory of the Apple ][c, which is probably not an accident.
- It’s always nice to see mentions of DragonFly show up in Linuxish places.
- No, really. Use zsh. That’s the article’s title, not necessarily my recommendation. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas talks about logging only sudo failures. It’s mentioned in a throwaway paragraph, but he also makes the excellent security point of having a separate, inaccessible-to-most logging host.
Your unrelated link of the week: Did you know one of the original ideas was to name DragonFly “TortoiseBSD” “TurtleBSD”? Probably not the best name.
Sascha Wildner’s added updatesfrom FreeBSD for the Areca arcmsr(4) driver; specifically for the ARC-1213, ARC-1223 and ARC-1882 models.
MARC, which stands for Mailing list ARChives, has a lot of mailing lists. It now includes the DragonFly users@ list, along with the others. (It’s not linked in *BSD on the main MARC page yet, but it should be soon.) It’s worth digging through the massive, massive wall of text on that page to find a mailing list you didn’t know existed.
Google Code-In 2012 has been announced. I’m not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year… anyone want to step up?
This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too. This only applies if you’re running DragonFly 3.1, of course.
I got the old mailing list archives converted to Mailman. As I wrote in a post to users@, please let me know about problems. There’s some garbled messages from the old archive that were placed into the 2012-Sept. section for each message; I’ll be cleaning those up manually.
The old mailing list software for @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, bestserv, apparently allowed people not subscribed to a list to post to it, after answering a confirmation message for each message posted.
The closest way to duplicate that for Mailman is to sign up for the list you want, and then turn off mail delivery for your email address in the config page for that mailing list. This won’t affect a lot of people, since most people want list output in their mailbox, but there’s at least a few I’ve fixed that way.
The combination of Mihai Carabas’s successful Summer of Code work on the scheduler and the recent Postgres benchmarking got Matthew Dillon to start thinking about making UNIX domain sockets work better, a shortcut around the buffer cache, scheduler improvements and then a new default scheduler, along with a change in idle CPU behavior. The best place to understand all the changes is in his long post to users@.
We should have benchmarks soon to show the performance improvements from all this.
Smartmontools will catch impending disk failures about 2/3 of the time, so it’s useful to run it and interpret the results. The results can be somewhat complex, though. However, it can be useful to look at other people talking about the output and glean knowledge from the context.
A discussion of why root automatically lists dotfiles with ls and all other users do not led to a long thread that includes some UNIX history. There’s some useful and some not-so-useful parts in the thread, but it did indirectly produce a way to reverse the listing effect itself.
Francois Tigeot benchmarked the recent Postgres 9.3 release. Postgres apparently switched to using mmap instead of SYSV shared memory, and Francois has done this to show the performance differences. (view the PDF in his post.) Of course, work has continued since this was posted, so there should be new numbers soon, and new changes I’ll document in a future post.
I haven’t found a reference to the exact decision Postgres made on how to handle memory; please post a link in comments if you know a good source.
NYCBUG, the NY BSD user’s group, has an RSS feed for their speaker events, found via Dru Lavigne’s always useful BSD Events twitter. The next event at the start of October is a talk about SMPng in FreeBSD. Given that it was the project that in part led to the creation of DragonFly, I’d like to hear about it. (and even better, have someone more qualified than I compare and contrast that approach with what’s in DragonFly.)
If you do, they don’t get cleaned up during the normal ‘hammer cleanup’ nightly routine. Chris Turner has added a way to manually specify them as a cleanup target.
I’m pretty sure in this case ‘offline’ means ‘nothing streaming to it from a master disk’. I think.