Posted on
Doc to do

Thomas Belian made a post to dragonfly.docs asking if a translation of the documentation to German would help. I made a reply that is probably worth repeating:

“It would be nice to have; you may want to wait until the documentation is more “settled”, probably after the 1.0 release. If you’d like to write original documentation, that would help too, and that can be done right
now.

We could use an extended section on networking setup, and a section on ports. If you check out the cvs target ‘doc‘, you can base it off the files there. Specifically, copy one of the chapter.sgml files in a directory under /doc/en/books/userguide/ and start working. If you are unfamiliar with the markup, you can read up on it at http://www.docbook.org/tdg/en/html/docbook.html“

Posted on
Ports link, refreshed

Discussion of an improved/replaced ‘ports’ system ran on for a bit on dragonfly.kernel, and Eirik Nygaard reposted an important link: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s extensive writeup.

(Watch for subtle hint!) It’s good enough to serve as a task outline for anyone contemplating ports work. (end hint)

Posted on
Why not apt-get?

Matt Dillon mentioned that he’s considering using apt-get combined with VFS to create a sort of ‘per-user’ port visibility. Quoting his examples:

“So the ‘apache user’ might only have 10 ports installed (and only access to those 10) while a GUI user might have 50 ports installed (and only access to those 50). Overlaps would be allowed… the environments would be considered independant.

Such environments would also enforce basic isolation/separation/security features such as “/usr is read-only except for /usr/local”, and would be stackable, but instead of trying to use them on a per-package basis we would use them on a per-user basis (or something like that).

This gives us the best of both worlds in my view.

This would mean a new ‘port’ system would have to wait until VFS is finished, though using apt-get without the per-user separation would be achieveable almost immediately.

Posted on
Switch now or pain later

David Rhodus mentioned in his GoBSD journal that DragonFly is a better choice right now than FreeBSD 4.10, highlighting a FreeBSD-4 unfixed bug in his journal. He also let slip that he’s working on a commercial operating system based on DragonFly, with the first release candidate coming very soon.

Posted on
Improvements in the future

Rahul Siddharthan pointed at this post as evidence of softupdates not working as quickly as it used to, for FreeBSD and by extension DragonFly. Matt Dillon replied that:

“FreeBSD-5 has a lot overhead, especially when it comes to the buffer manipulation that softupdates does. DFly should be nearly the same as 4.x in regards to FS performance.

There isn’t much I can do about softupdates but the (slowly progressing) namecache work will eventually allow us to release the exclusive lock on the directory vnode during directory searches and this will bring up our lots-of-little-file benchmark numbers considerably.

Another issue that slows down filesystem operations is the busy-page lockout that occurs when the system is writing data to disk and some other operation wants to modify the page undergoing I/O. That is ”on the table’ as well.”

Posted on
Don’t forget about gcc3!

Hiten Pandya noted that, if you are creating a port override in dfports, setting CCVER=gcc3 and testing your override using the different compiler is a good idea. He’s found a few ports where poeple didn’t do that and the build was broken.

Posted on
Saving crash dumps

Sascha Wildner described in a post to dragonfly.bugs,

dumpdev="/dev/ad0s1b"

placed in /etc/rc.conf will enable your system to save crash dumps in /var/crash, saving the effort of retyping them in a post. (“makeoptions DEBUG=-g” in your kernel config is also needed.)