Here’s a post by yours truly, on how to move to pkgsrc-2012Q1 though building from source. This is for anyone sick of waiting for me to finish the binary build of pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon posted a followup on that fix for clustering I noted yesterday. It describes the exact problems better than I could, though the result is the same: you should update if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly.
A fix for cluster_write() issues reported by multiple people is now available, so if you’re running a version of DragonFly newer than 3.0.2, you’ll want to update.
Each of the 4 DragonFly participants for Summer of Code have posted an introductory email and details of their projects. Here’s direct links to their posts for your reading convenience:
- Vishesh Yadav – Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
- Mihai Carabas – Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
- Loganaden Velvindron – Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
- Ivan Sichmann Freitas – 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels
(Yes, same format as my last post, but now the links are to their posts, not the sparse Google info pages.)
Sepherosa Ziehau added “Rescue Retransmission for SACK-based Loss Recovery Algorithm” in a commit, where he details just where this would be handy. It’s on by default and the sysctl net.inet.tcp.rescuesack can be used to turn it off.
Welcome our newest committer: Markus Pfeiffer. He’s ‘profmakx’ on EFNet #dragonfly, and has been working on a port of FreeBSD’s USB infrastructure – which I am looking forward to, tremendously.
Google has announced their projects accepted for Summer of Code: DragonFly has 4 projects of the 1,212 funded:
- Vishesh Yadav – Implement inotify interface and Indexing Service for Filesystem
- Mihai Carabas – Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
- Loganaden Velvindron – Privilege Separation in DragonflyBSD
- Ivan Sichmann Freitas – 32 bit API for 64 bit kernels
(Hopefully those links are to visible pages) We had way more good proposals than available mentors/slot, unfortunately. So if you didn’t get in, think about next year, or maybe look at doing the work on your own; there’s some great ideas out there that I’d like to see happen.
Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org. If you’re doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help. (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)
I’m still working on building them. I kept getting panics, which seem to be fixed by this commit, so I should have something soon. Sorry!
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL in DragonFly to version 1.0.1a, to fix the recent vulnerability CVE-2012-2110. Thanks Peter!
Francois Tigeot has followed up with a description of how to enable and disable quotas on DragonFly, which will work for most any local file system, unless rebooted. There’s also the vquota(8) man page.
Based on a recent post from Chris Turner to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list, here’s a bug report that should get you to a working lang/OpenJDK7 pkgsrc package.
DragonFly now has a optimized scoreboard for SACK, thanks to Sepherosa Ziehau. What’s that mean? SACK is a way to make sure only the needed parts of a TCP transmission get retransmitted, when multiple packets are lost. The scoreboard is where the packets needing retransmission are tracked. So, the result of these improvements is better performance in packet-lossy situations.
(Please correct me if your understanding is better than mine; my explanation is based on stumbling around the Internet for a few minutes of reading.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the em(4) driver from Intel; it only matters if you are using the specific chipsets mentioned in the commit message.
If you’re curious about Hammer2 development, it’s been ongoing, but there haven’t been any more juicy commits to point at. Here’s one – the start of the messaging system.
DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone. What’s this mean? Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.
Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to the initial TCP congestion window, based on a number of papers he links to in his post. The immediate effect is if you’re on DragonFly-current, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next upgrade. The long term effect could be improvements in latency by improving reactions to bufferbloat. Or not; this is pretty technical.
DragonFly has been given 6 slots (i.e. spaces for students) by Google for this year’s Summer of Code. That’s great! We have a crop of great student proposals this year, so far, so the biggest worry at this point is how to get to them all.