There’s been a large number of fixes and improvements to DragonFly 3.2 lately, so I’m planning to roll DragonFly 3.2.2 this weekend so there’s an image with them all.
If you were thinking you wanted to try gcc 4.7 with pkgsrc, John Marino’s described the option you need to set. It only works in pkgsrc-master right now (because of changes John made), and not every package in pkgsrc will build.
The advantage is that it’s also possible, with the same syntax, to set pkgsrc to build with gcc 4.4. This means the default compiler in DragonFly can be changed to gcc 4.7 and pkgsrc packages that aren’t compatible can still be built.
Update: Check this minor change: ‘?=’ instead of ‘=’.
Whomever submitted this story to Slashdot really doesn’t like FreeBSD; they’re describing FreeBSD’s annual end-of-year fund drive as failed. The month-long drive is only about a week old and has already picked up donations at a faster rate than any previous year’s donation drive, but apparently the poster – and Slashdot’s editors – can’t be bothered to do math. While we’re on the topic, donate to the FreeBSD Foundation; they do good things.
(There’s DragonFly too, though we’re not as ambitious or officially 501(c)(3) non-profit.)
Matthew Dillon has written up another update on his progress with HAMMER2. (I need to be consistent in how I write that.) He has disks being exported and mounted on other systems, and adds an explanation of some of the issues around creating reliable multi-master setups. Before you get too excited, no, multi-master isn’t working yet, and this is not production ready.
There’s more benchmarks for DragonFly vs. other systems on Phoronix. It has the same problem as previous benchmarks; some of the benchmarks may have no connection to reality (what does the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver” actually test?), and almost every system has a different version of the gcc compiler. So it’s meaningless in terms of comparative or absolute performance. On the other hand, DragonFly doesn’t do badly.
You can also look at the comments to see someone absolutely freak out over the very existence of things that aren’t Linux. I’m not sure if it’s actually trolling, since the comments are so exactly wrong.
Shopping! This is the big holiday shopping weekend in the US, and I usually put together something here.
- Buy an SSD for someone who doesn’t have one – including you if that’s the case. There’s better and worse SSDs out there, but you’ll get a speed benefit no matter what, and other bonuses are possible.
- The Tea Bag Buddy, which also comes in a color-changing version. Because tea.
- My perennial Science! suggestions: ThinkGeek, American Science and Surplus, Ward’s Scientific, Carolina, and United Nuclear, The Bone Room, and Skulls Unlimited.
- The Best of BSD 2011 and Last Year in BSD Security, from the BSD Magazine publisher.
- For more BSD, there’s always the orgs themselves. FreeBSD, NetBSD, and OpenBSD – no DragonFly, though there ought to be. Also, ISC.
- For lists of gifts, there’s the Verge Gift Guide, which has some interesting offshoots.
- Another long list: The Comics Reporter’s Shopping List.
If you have suggestions, please comment!
Because of the recent good results for pgbench on DragonFly 3.2, Phoronix has a new benchmark of DragonFly using other (possibly unrelated) tests. There’s not a lot of information to glean from them; they are testing operations different than what was optimized for pgbench in 3.2. I’d like to see DragonFly 3.0 tested the same way to see how much improvement there was between versions.
We (as in DragonFly) are not participating in Google Code-In this year, but I’m happy to see there’s another BSD in there – NetBSD. (There’s only 10 participating organizations, so it’s not easy.) Look at their page if you’re in the right age range to do projects.
MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a ‘liveUSB’ distribution of DragonFly with software preinstalled, has been updated to run using DragonFly 3.2.1 as a base. The linked page contains screenshots and a description of what comes out-of-the-box. (mentioned previously here.)
Today is the day that FreeBSD moves to using clang by default. This is not necessarily a surprise, but I like the finality of calling it “Clang-Day”. I think Clang will probably be the next compiler brought into DragonFly’s base system, instead of the next release of gcc. Don’t make any bets on my statement, though, cause I certainly won’t be the one doing it. (It’s hard.)
There was one more file to change for the bmake import, so if you are running DragonFly 3.3 and updated between the 28th and 30th of October, do a full rebuild.
I mentioned this before in the Lazy Reading from last Sunday, but it’s worth a second look: Apple’s new Fusion Drive product appears to be very much like DragonFly’s swapcache. DragonFly doesn’t have exclusive right to the idea of caching on a faster disk, clearly, so I’m not complaining that it’s “ours”. It’s frustrating to see product announcement/press releases stumbling all over this like it’s a new thing.
Then again, having new ideas about technology ideas and making sure they spread is one of the points of the BSD license, so perhaps there’s no good reason to complain at all.
(Before anyone reads too much into this: No, I don’t know of any direct relationship between swapcache and Fusion Drive; they may have no common background other than structure.)
A thread on pkgsrc-users@ reminds me: adding a specific line for bin-install will save time when rebuilding packages; pkgsrc will use existing binary packages instead of rebuilding from source when possible, when this is set. At least, I’m pretty sure that’s what it does.
Sandip Jadhav asked if anyone was working on an I/O scheduler. Chris Turner replied with a “no”, but also with a list of places to look for details on writing one, which I’m linking here for posterity.
John Marino is working on a very good idea: bringing bmake into DragonFly as a replacement for the current ‘make’. bmake is going through more active development and apparently also in use/will be used? on FreeBSD, so syncing up with the same make flavor as FreeBSD and NetBSD will help everyone. It’ll also remove the problem where you ‘make’ everything in DragonFly, except pkgsrc packages which you ‘bmake’. It’s not changed over yet.
(What does OpenBSD use for make?)
A conversation about compilers in the DragonFly base system led peeter (must) to describe his group’s use of OpenMPI on DragonFly for physics calculations. Apparently he’s had a significant performance improvement on DragonFly.
Along similar lines, John Marino helped out by bringing in libssp and libgomp for gcc 4.7 for use with OpenMP. (This is in DragonFly 3.3, not 3.2).
John Marino did a bulk build of pkgsrc using gcc 4.7.2, and posted the results. The result? About 1% of packages that built with gcc 4.4 did not build with 4.7.2. Whether that’s a problem with gcc or a problem with how each of those software packages were created by the original authors, I don’t know.
Google is hosting a ‘Doc Camp’, where people get together and write documentation for open source projects. There’s a page that talks about it. Last year’s inaugural event was apparently quite successful. I haven’t been to it, but I think a day just for documentation is a good idea.
I’m planning for DragonFly 3.2 to come with pkgsrc-2012Q3, the most recent release. I’m building binary packages to match, and the build should complete by the time we release on the 22nd…
Notice I said “should” – sometimes the universe conspires against bulk builds.