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.
ZFS was originally created at Sun and open sourced. Sun was absorbed by Oracle and stopped being open (or even really existing), so ZFS was taken up by several separate groups – FreeBSD and Illumos being two examples. OpenZFS has been announced, in part to provide common reference for other platforms that might implement it and probably to avoid capability fragmentation. It’s certainly a good idea.
(If I have my history wrong, please correct me.)
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.
Sascha Wildner has ported rum(4), run(4), and urtwn(4) from FreeBSD to DragonFly, to work within the not-yet-default new USB framework. This happened some days ago, but I’m just now catching up.
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.)
Just seen: EdgeBSD, a version of NetBSD with different goals in mind. (Seen on Hacker News)
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?)
Definitely Saturdays for this summary. In other BSDs this week:
- It’s FreeBSD, but it can apply to any BSD where a personal attribution license is used: Julian Elischer’s name comes with every iPhone.
- cxgbe(4) cards can now display their temperature under FreeBSD.
- ciss(4) supports additional HP RAID controllers under FreeBSD.
- Bind has been updated to 9.8.5-P2 in FreeBSD.
- FreeBSD has initial support for the Cubieboard 2.
- FreeBSD now has a USB test program.
- NetBSD supports some additional ZTE modem devices.
- NetBSD has cgram, a substitution-cipher solver. For amusement purposes?
- NetBSD supports the Nuvoton W83795G monitoring device.
- OpenBSD now supports wireless devices using the Ralink RT3060.
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.
Several parts of dragonflybsd.org are moving to a new blade server, so there may be some service interruptions during the transition.
Joris Giovannangeli, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, posted his thoughts on credential descriptors – have a read. He is working on capsicum and DragonFly, so this is a natural thought process.
Every year, people ask “Why can’t writing documentation be part of Summer of Code?” (Not necessarily for DragonFly, but in general) Google has a “Doc Camp”, where a whole lot of documentation gets produced in sprints, and anyone can participate – not just Summer of Code students.
If this sounds interesting to you, your application has to be in by August 7th 9th. (URL and date updated)
Please welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Johannes Hofmann. He earned this by coming up with a significant chunk of DragonFly’s upcoming KMS/915 support, and it’s now easier to just have him work directly than to be constantly committing for him.
Since there’s a newer set of dports binary packages uploaded, I thought I’d spend my weekend upgrading, to catch up.
‘pkg upgrade’
And that was it. Well, not really. I had to dump and restore my Postgres databases, cause of the switch from 9.0 to 9.2 as default. I had to build php5 from source to get the Apache module. Those two things together took longer than the entire download and upgrade of the rest of my system – some ~200 packages?