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.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI-X support to igb(4), the Intel PRO/1000 gigabit network card. What does that mean? The commit message mentions a default transmit rate of 1.48Mpps small packets, which is good?
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
Francois Tigeot has added the Intel PRO/10GbE driver from FreeBSD, or ixgbe(4). A couple features are turned off, for now.
Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.
More benchmarks, in this case a comparison of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and DragonFly. I’m not even sure how to derive meaning from it.
This is a report for last week’s work, so this is week 6 we are in now, and the reports are week 5’s status. So:
If you have an Intel processor with multiple cores and hyperthreading support, you can compile a new kernel and try out Mihia Carabas’s GSoC work already; he’s created a test using the OpenSSL test case to time scheduling performance vs. number of threads.