There’s a new page up on the DragonFly website, about using rpkgmanager to manage your pkgsrc-installed packages.
In DragonFly, there’s only a few places C++ is used. If you wanted to make sure DragonFly was pure C, Samuel Greear lists those remaining nooks and crannies.
Almost all the packages in pkgsrc support non-root installation now… except these last 31. I recall something about their removal by the next quarterly release if they still don’t work, or maybe just after. Jump in if one of these packages is useful to you.
Some cleanup in the CVS -> git process wasn’t happening, so if you have been using pkgsrc 2011Q3 from git (i.e. via make in /usr), re-pull to make sure you have everything.
(The post noting this seems to have been eaten by the mailarchive… that’ll be replaced.)
There’ll be some brief outages this week as a few of the dragonflybsd.org machines are upgraded. The new machines will be 64-bit DragonFly, and have 16G of RAM. RAM is crazy cheap these days. I’m continually dumbfounded by it.
This recent structure change (are there others like this? Maybe?) means that existing binaries may need to be recompiled for anyone tracking DragonFly master. This probably means that an upgrade from 2.10 to 2.12 will require rebuilds of all binary pkgsrc packages.
Well, they’re still available, but you don’t want them in your config any more because they can slow you down. This will only affect you if you are running binary files from DragonFly 1.2 or earlier, or… I guess a 4.3 BSD binary? From 1986? I’m sure there’s some other reason for it to be there.
Samuel Greear, Jan Lentfer, and others are looking at Postgres scaling on DragonFly. The work they are doing isn’t in the tree yet, but here’s a graph showing some of the performance differences.
Francois Tigeot does something very useful: he monitors the resource usage on his systems, and tracks how it changes over time. Because of that, he noticed that the recent VM changes in DragonFly have made quite a difference in memory usage. (See the green area in the attached chart, around week 42.)
Michael Lucas is building jails on DragonFly, and his story of doing so works pretty well as a how-to guide.
DragonFly’s now on the BuildFarm list of Postgres test systems. (via Jan Lentfer in IRC)
Did you know that there’s a BSDDay 2011 in Bratislava, Slovakia, on November 5th? Well, I do thanks to a random Google search and now you do too. You and I both need to keep watching BSD Events.
Samuel Greear graphed the performance differences for Postgres and MySQL on DragonFly, before and after the recent VM changes. Note that 1: this was done a little while ago, so I think the performance difference would be even greater now, and 2: this was graphed versus the already-performing-better 2.12, not the current stable release of 2.10.
Google’s running the Code-In project again for 2011, where open source projects mentor 13-17-year-olds on a variety of small projects. DragonFly participated last year and had lots of good work done. However, we need ideas, the more the better. Please add whatever comes to mind.
There’s a rare crash in DragonFly 2.10, where applications would segfault. The system would run find. This is apparently more likely to happen in 2.12, though reports on this vary. It’s real, though.
Matthew Dillon went looking for this bug, and happened to roll back vm_token, the last lock in DragonFly that presented a serious impediment to multiprocessing. It’s a big patch. It fixes the problem, which is great! It also happens to make DragonFly buildworlds almost twice as fast depending on the number of cores in the system.
Holy crap we want to get that out… but it makes some significant changes to the system and needs to be tested. So, the next release probably won’t be for a few weeks.
If you want to help, build master and do something with it – move data, run server programs, whatever. Report crashes. This performance improvement is worth working for.
I didn’t know this existed, but there it is: the BSD Router Project is a software router, which just reached version 1.0. (via)
They aren’t really release candidates per se, just “images I built from the 2.12 branch”, but they are available for testing.
There’s only two commits, already in DragonFly-current, to add to 2.12 before it’s clear of all listed release requirements. And maybe binary package builds… which I’m about 2/3 of the way through.
Dennis Ritchie, one of the people behind UNIX and the C language, has died. (via skullY on #dragonflybsd on EFNet) Look at his Bell Labs web page for some details on his history. The death of Steve Jobs will get a lot of media attention, but I’d argue that Ritchie affected more computers in far more ways.
Among other changes to pkgin 0.5 (available in pkgsrc-wip but not pkgsrc-2011Q3), it now notices if you need a newer pkg_install because you’ve shifted to a more recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, and grabs the appropriate binary package to fix that. Thanks, iMil!