Category: Goings-on

Eitan Adler is the newest DragonFly committer; you may recognize his name from some previous commits added by others, where he synced up various work between the BSDs.

The 3.6 release of DragonFly is available now.  I just put up those images last night, so if your favorite mirror doesn’t have it, give it a few hours.

For those updating from 3.4 to 3.6: there’s an ABI change, so you will have to upgrade all your packages.  If you’re using pkgsrc and ready to switch to dports, now’s the time.  If you already switched to dports on your 3.4 system, binary packages for 3.6 have already been built and you can use pkg to upgrade.

Also for upgrades from 3.4: You can pull the 3.6 source normally:

cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_6
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_6

But there’s a slight change needed for the 3.4 to 3.6 transition: an extra reboot in the build process:

# make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && reboot

# make upgrade

This is all noted in /usr/src/UPDATING and in the release notes, but I’m taking no chances.

As noted on the kernel@ list, it’s tagged but not yet in image form.

Matthew Dillon did some more performance tuning for DragonFly.  I’ll just pull a paragraph from the commit message, since that will have more impact than anything I say:

Improves fork/exec concurrency on monster of static binaries from 14200/sec to 55000/sec+. For dynamic binaries improve from around 2500/sec to 9000/sec or so (48 cores fork/exec’ing different dynamic binaries). For the same dynamic binary it’s more around 5000/sec or so.

“monster” is a 48-core machine used for testing.

DragonFly developer Francois Tigeot  was interviewed on linuxfr.org.  As you can probably guess from the names, it’s a French site, but don’t let that stop you if you’re an Anglophone.

The venerable (from 1979!) program, lpr, has been superseded by CUPS in many installations.  Francois Tigeot suggested removing it, but it’s still directly usable in specific situations and easier to just shift out of the way.  It’s staying, but it’s interesting to see how it still gets used.

Update: Predrag Punosevac has descriptions of the various tools involved.

I’m planning to branch DragonFly 3.6 this weekend.  The actual release will come 2 weeks later.  (Ignore what I wrote about a dports installer/image.)

Matthew Dillon has gone after reducing contention and improving SMP performance as vigorously as possible, using dports builds on a 48-processor machine as a test.   The machine’s building more than 1000 packages an hour, last I saw on IRC.

John Marino has updated ldns and drill to version 1.6.16.

There is a search plugin for Mozilla that searches DragonFly man pages.  (Thanks Samuel Greear)

Antonio Huete Jimenez has added a new rconfig script that automatically mirrors the installed disks with ccd(4).  You don’t remember what to do with rconfig(8)?  Automatically (and headlessly) install DragonFly, of course!  There’s already other examples – they’re just shell scripts.

I put together a list of what I’m thinking could be in the next DragonFly release.  Going by our regular schedule, that’s a bit more than a month off.  Of note: Summer of Code material and defaulting to dports.  Follow the thread for more.

 

DragonFly has two included compilers – GCC 4.4, and GCC 4.7.  Traditionally, we switch from one compiler to the other as default, and then replace the old one with a newer release, and so on.

Until recently, dports built almost exclusively using GCC 4.4.  John Marino’s switching to GCC 4.7, for a variety of reasons he lists in a recent post to users@.  An interesting point that he raises: GCC 4.4 won’t necessarily be replaced with a newer GCC, but perhaps clang?

Sepherosa Ziehau has made a number of improvements to TCP in DragonFly – specifically, nonblocking and blocking connect(2) performance.  See each of his commits for statistics on how much this has reduced processor use under high load.  He has also written up an extensive description of how all this TCP stuff works in DragonFly.

In similar news, he has a nginx patch that delivers a significant performance increase.  It may go into nginx itself.