A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
In a discussion about benchmarks, it was noted that /etc/malloc.conf changes can help benchmarks tremendously. Rahul Siddharthan suggested ‘/etc/malloc.conf -> H' and Jeremy Messenger suggested '/etc/malloc.conf -> aj‘
Also, Matt Dillon made a number of suggestions on what to check when benchmarking DragonFly vs. FreeBSD (4 or 5)
Matt Dillon quote follows:
Continue reading “Benchmark setups”
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert pointed out prelinking should be mentioned on the 2003 report; here’s the text that will soon show up on that report:
Prelinking
Prelinking capability was added to DragonFly by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, which allows faster loading of applications that use a large number of dynamic libraries while running, like Qt/KDE. It is not currently hooked into the system or any port building process.
David Rhodus has the journaling filesystem code from Apple located in vfs_journal.c and vfs_journal.h. He estimate it’d take 2-3 (long) days of work to get it worked into the system, which would mean no more long fscks after unlcean shutdowns. Any takers? Everyone would love you for it.
Eirik Nygaard was looking for something to do; Max Laier pointed out removal of #if defined(__FreeBSD__) / #if __FreeBSD_version > 5 would help, and Jeffrey Hsu indicated backporting the UFS2 size extensions would also be good.
I’ll quote my own followup to say there’s plenty of non-coding tasks available, too.
The main DragonFly website now has an additional mirror listed (bottom of page) for daily snapshots, and Matt Dillon’s put up slides from his talk at BAFUG in a new Docs section.
Port-fixing fiend Joerg Sonnenberger has committed a dfports override for OpenOffice.
In a discussion about a submitted firewall design, Jeroen Ruigrok listed Data Size Neutrality at unix.org.
Dave Leimbach has added changes to KDE in CVS to allow kdebase to compile on DragonFly. This is in the actual KDE source code, not a ports override.
Joerg Sonnenberger is looking for anyone with either PCCARD or CARDBUS hardware, for testing of this patch and this patch.
He noted, “After applying both patches remove bus/pccard and link bus/pcmcia to bus/pccard.”
The dragonflybsd.org website now contains a FAQ, which is mostly my fault.
Inspired in part by the semi-regular status reports for FreeBSD, I put together (with help from a number of people, including Hiten Pandya and David Rhodus) a DragonFly status report for 2003.
I’ve cleaned up my local archive of the DragonFly discussion groups so that start and end dates are correct; they are available at http://www.shiningsilence.com/mailarchive/.
Paul Herman, Senior Researcher of the Kitchen Refrigerator, has a really nice writeup about time and clocks in operating systems (with graphs, even!), and work he wants to bring into DragonFly.
Michal Pasternak posted a plea for use of Pkgsrc to the submit discussion group. Given that he specifically said he wasn’t participating in that group and wasn’t going to do any work to make pkgsrc compatible, and that VFS is not yet complete, that’s probably as far as it will go. I’m editorializing.
YONETANI Tomokazu reported his laptop was running very hot with DragonFly. The CPU was running when it didn’t need to be; Matt Dillon fixed this.
Peter Kadau has been talking about changing the userland scheduler (which could be done dynamically, as Matt Dillon pointed out) and a post out of that discussion by Matt Dillon does a nice job of summing up the differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD-5 process management.
Joerg Sonnenberger has been adding a lot of port overrides – freetype2, xmms, etc. Always make sure to check dfports first when you want to add software.
Dan Melomedman, during a discussion about using/not using bash in the base system, pointed at execline as a better alternative to shell scripting.