Category: Goings-on

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.

I tagged it last week, but it took me a while to build the images.  See the tag commit for a list of the bugfixes.  The big thing for me is the fix for amrd and the virtual machine performance fix.  Either update via git, or download an image.

All the machines in dragonflybsd.org should now be available over IPv6.

Also, Matthew Dillon did something weird to the DragonFly IPv6 network stack.

avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master, is the final dragonflybsd.org system to be moved into the new colocated blade server.  Your downloads of binary packages or DragonFly images should be speedier.

There’s several debates exclusive to the Unix-like world: Vi vs. Emacs, System V vs. BSD, and so on.  A more recent one that people tend to fragment over is XML in config files vs. anything else.  Read through this recent threa, starting here, about SMF (which became about XML) on users@.

I’ll be working on the 3.4.3 release of DragonFly within the next 24 hours, and it should be available this week.  I’ll have a list of the bugfixes it contains…

It’s really neat to suddenly encounter something done just for DragonFly that you didn’t know was coming: A port of Go to DragonFly.   I think these changes are going into the next Go release, or at least I hope so.  (More on Go if you haven’t encountered it before.)

The mailing list archives for DragonFly (lists.dragonflybsd.org) have been moved to new hardware.  (Yay!)  The patch that actually shows date in the listings needs to reapplied, cause Mailman is somewhat stale.  (Boo!)  I applied the patch and I’m regenerating all the archives now.  (Yay!)  There’s some garbled messages in the archives that cause a bunch of “no subject” partial messages to be dumped at the end.  (Boo!)  I’ll manually fix them if I can, someday.  (Yay?)

Several parts of dragonflybsd.org are moving to a new blade server, so there may be some service interruptions during the transition.