A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s added TSO support (that’s TCP Segmentation Offloading”, or “Large Segment Offload” going by Wikipedia) within IPv4 on DragonFly, pushing segmentation work from the CPU to the network card. There’s also some DragonFly-specific improvements.
There’s been a lot of commits from him lately focused around network card improvements; they haven’t been easily summarizable, but it’s worth watching if you are interested in high-bandwidth usage and the hardware to support it.
The ciss(4) device, if you don’t know offhand, is for a variety of SCSI-3 adapters – mostly ones labeled “HP Smart Array”. Sascha Wildner has imported a large number of driver updates from FreeBSD.
Sascha Wildner’s been working on his own DragonFly live images, in DVD or USB form. It uses XFCE along with a number of other packages listed in his post. They are .xz compressed, so they are nice and small for download, but make sure you have something that knows that format.
Not all flavors of Atom CPU support frequency scaling, as Sven Gaerner found out. This means more heat and more power usage. There’s further details scattered through the thread, but Sascha Wildner found what seems to be the definitive answer of which variants do and do not.
Pierre Abbat noticed that bc(1)‘s usage of GNU readline something that wasn’t GNU readline made it harder to use; Sascha Wildner changed it to use libedit. Pierre’s other complaint, that BSD man page output stays on-screen when completed, is a positive feature. Linux systems that clear man page output enrage me, because I expect to be able to take advantage of my scroll buffer.
Juraj Sipos wrote me to describe MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a live DragonFly image that has additional software preinstalled, and can easily be set to understand Sanskrit. It’s available in DVD and USB versions.
Thanks to David Christensen of Broadcom, Sepherosa Ziehau was able to add BCM5718 and BCM57785 support in the new bnx(4) driver.
John Marino sent a nice email to users@ about the improvements in build success for pkgsrc since May – and I can’t find it in the mailarchive. I’ll paste a summary after the break.
I hope it’s week 8. Anyway here’s the reports from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
At least for DragonFly, every current participant in Google Summer of Code passed the midterm evaluation. Yay!
I don’t, but I know there are people that do. That’s why I’m pointing out this discussion where it appears that TeXLive 2012 won’t support NetBSD, which may mean no DragonFly either. There’s the not-yet-packaged alternative kertex. TeXLive is in pkgsrc, so I don’t know if that means the package will be discontinued or just altered.
(Please correct me where I go wrong here; I’m not very familiar with this, but it sounds like a drastic enough change that it should be mentioned.)
Update: as several people pointed out, it’s just prebuilt binary versions that aren’t being provided upstream. The packages will all still be present in pkgsrc. So, no functional change for most everyone.
… because versions 3.0 and 3.3 will be leaving pkgsrc soon-ish. You’d probably want to update anyway, but this is just in case you haven’t been upgrading too vigorously.
John Marino has added a ‘gcc47’ compiler ccvar, so you can build world and kernel with it. ‘It’ is actually gcc-aux, since it seems to work better than the basic (“vanilla”?) gcc47. You also get Ada support, though that wasn’t the driving reason to pick it. This is brand new so don’t try it unless you’re ready to discover issues.
Is there any other BSD able to use gcc 4.7 for world/kernel? Even 4.6? Most of the attention has been on clang.
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)
Nuno Antunes is still working on that netgraph upgrade. Among other changes, ng_tty has been added. What’s it do? Something with ppp, I think.
From a thread on users@, I bring you Visible Capacitor Failures. If the problems pictured are new to you… trust me, you will see them up close someday.
Someone trying DragonFly couldn’t get it to start, and appeared to have a confused disk. It looks like the system BIOS were at fault, and Matt Dillon has an explanation of this minefield. (Including some comments on 4k physical disk sectors.)