A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
If you ever wanted to read an extensive discussion about the scheduler, today’s your day. Mihai Carabas, who posted the details of a long discussion he had with Matthew Dillon about how the scheduler works. You may recall Mihai’s name from the very successful GSoC scheduler project that recently finished.
(look, a link to the new Mailman archive!)
All the mailing lists at @dragonflybsd.org have been converted over to Mailman. The old archives are still functioning, and will continue to update until I can find enough old material to retroactively complete the Mailman archives.
If you’re on any of the dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, I’m converting them over from bestserv to Mailman. I’ve done bugs@, commits@, hammer@, and test@ so far, and I’ll move the old archives over to the same format as soon as I find an actual mbox file with the old messages in it. The remaining lists should be tomorrow.
(If you got a note tonight from a list you were sure you were unsubscribed from, that was my fault; sorry! I didn’t understand the format of the bestserv user lists.)
DragonFly user varialus has created a page on the DragonFly website (it’s a wiki, after all) with all the notes taken from trying installation, etc. There’s far more notes than I expected there, so it’s worth a read.
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 3.0.3 disk images, both ISO and IMG. They should start appearing on a mirror site near you in the next 24 hours. This took a while after the tagging, I know, but I wanted to make sure every one of them booted. I didn’t on a previous release, and regretted it.
Francois Tigeot benchmarked several different operating systems using Postgres 9.2b3, including DragonFly, and published the results. I have a local copy of the PDF since the attachment didn’t really survive the archiving. Follow the thread for discussion. The Linux results look abnormally high, so it is possible that something different is happening on that platform…
DragonFly had a successful Google Summer of Code even this year. It marks our 5th time participating, 7th if you count Google Code-In events.
Mihai Carabas worked on adding SMT/HT awareness to the DragonFly scheduler. This project was very successful. The original goal was just to take advantage of threading with the scheduler, but the benchmarks published by Mihai show in general a 5% speedup from these scheduler changes. His work has already been committed.
Vishesh Yadav implemented an inotify interface in DragonFly. inotify is an originally Linux-based system for monitoring files and directories for changes. A specific use for this is an inotify-aware locate program, so that a list of file locations can be kept ‘live’. His code for the inotify interface should be committed to DragonFly very soon.
(This was written in part for Google to use on their Open Source Blog.)
I’m working on building new images, but: DragonFly 3.0.3 has been tagged. If you’re running 3.0, you can update and get some of the recent bug fixes.
3.2 is the next major release of DragonFly, which will be relatively soon by the every-6-months release schedule. John Marino’s put together another catch-all bug report for that release.
Sascha Wildner’s been working on his own DragonFly live images, in DVD or USB form. It uses XFCE along with a number of other packages listed in his post. They are .xz compressed, so they are nice and small for download, but make sure you have something that knows that format.
Mihai Carabas has posted his weekly results, showing a 5% improvement in pgbench resultswhen using his scheduler. Vishesh Yadav is working on IN_MOVED_TO/IN_MOVED_FROM flags (part of inotify, I assume). Ivan Sichmann Freitas I haven’t heard from yet. (Ivan, where are you?)
Juraj Sipos wrote me to describe MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a live DragonFly image that has additional software preinstalled, and can easily be set to understand Sanskrit. It’s available in DVD and USB versions.
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
The release announcement for pkgsrc-2012Q2 is out. New in this quarterly release: statistics about clang and pkgsrc. A surprisingly large number of packages build just fine with clang instead of gcc.
Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.
More benchmarks, in this case a comparison of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and DragonFly. I’m not even sure how to derive meaning from it.
It’s almost an all-Vim week.
Your unrelated link of the week: Muppet Bohemian Rhapsody. Related: What kind of Muppet are you?