3.2 branch and release plan

As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd.  That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too.  It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages.  3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.

 

Posting but not reading mailing lists

The old mailing list software for @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, bestserv, apparently allowed people not subscribed to a list to post to it, after answering a confirmation message for each message posted.

The closest way to duplicate that for Mailman is to sign up for the list you want, and then turn off mail delivery for your email address in the config page for that mailing list.  This won’t affect a lot of people, since most people want list output in their mailbox, but there’s at least a few I’ve fixed that way.

SYSV shared memory vs. mmap

Francois Tigeot benchmarked the recent Postgres 9.3 release.  Postgres apparently switched to using mmap instead of SYSV shared memory, and Francois has done this to show the performance differences.  (view the PDF in his post.)  Of course, work has continued since this was posted, so there should be new numbers soon, and new changes I’ll document in a future post.

I haven’t found a reference to the exact decision Postgres made on how to handle memory; please post a link in comments if you know a good source.

NYCBUG, RSS, and SMPng

NYCBUG, the NY BSD user’s group, has an RSS feed for their speaker events, found via Dru Lavigne’s always useful BSD Events twitter.  The next event at the start of October is a talk about SMPng in FreeBSD.  Given that it was the project that in part led to the creation of DragonFly, I’d like to hear about it.  (and even better, have someone more qualified than I compare and contrast that approach with what’s in DragonFly.)