James Polera found that M5 Hosting was willing to install a DragonFly server for hosting, in addition to their other BSD/Linux offerings. Their service was also apparently excellent.
Here’s the state of my build of pkgsrc-2010Q4 packages:
- DragonFly 2.8/i386 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.8/x86_64 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.9/i386 – just started (happens on Avalon)
- DragonFly 2.9/x86_64 – in progress
So it will be some days yet… building over 4000 packages total is never quick.
If you’re using pkgin for managing pkgsrc packages, there’s a new bugfix to cover scenarios where there’s an old and new version dependency on the same item, like php between versions 5.2 and 5.3. It’s described in French, or translated English. (Thanks, Antonio Huete)
If you run pkgsrc-current, not the quarterly releases, the png library has just been updated to 1.5. This may break a few applications for now, and require a lot of rebuilding on your next update, since many packages depend on this.
If you are running a quarterly release of pkgsrc, you are unaffected.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master or git.dragonflybsd.org, should be back online within a few days. Matthew Dillon has details on the upgrade.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2010Q4, is out. I’m working on the build of binary packages… It’ll be some days.
Venkatesh Srinivas wrote out a long description of what he’s doing with the removal of the Giant Lock from tmpfs. I’m pasting it here verbatim, for your enjoyment.
Avalon, the machine that works as the master mirror site for DragonFly, and also as git.dragonflybsd.org, is being moved. Binary package downloads and source updates won’t work in the meantime. If you can’t wait for the system to come back, change the settings for pkg_radd or in /usr/Makefile to point at a different host.
A Phoronix test of DragonFly’s Hammer filesystem turned up, via Siju George. It’s not really a benchmark as much as it is a speed test, and it’s not a realistic comparison, but it’s interesting to see numbers.
They need a graph that shows how much historical data can be recovered by each file system, or how long fsck takes after a crash.
Update: Matthew Dillon points out the many ways these tests are wrong.
The burncd command has been removed; it hasn’t been working for some time. The sysutils/cdrtools utility cdrecord is the viable alternative. cdrecord is a pkgsrc application, but it comes on the DragonFly install CD/DVD/image/whatnot.
Ilya Dryomov wrote out some more details about his deduplication work, with some notes on what he plans next for this feature.
Here’s a nice collection of post-installation notes on DragonFly. They’re part of a larger UNIX note collection. I may have linked to it before; I don’t remember. This note’s new, though.
The end of year holidays intruded, so I haven’t had one of these for more than a week. Sorry! Merry Christmas, happy new year, etc.
- Whenever I am tempted to throw family pictures or something similar online in a ‘cloud’ service, I will reread this Jason Scott essay on the ‘Yahoo!locaust’ and come to my senses. (via)
- There’s a trade-off between size and price for SSDs. Past a certain point, any drive is generally ‘big enough’, and under a certain price, the cost doesn’t matter. We’re reaching the magic point where those two trends cross, as with this OCX Vertex 2 SSD drive, 60G in size and only $120 at Newegg. There’s lots of post-Christmas sales going on.
- How soon will SSD drives become normal and platter drives the anachronism, like single-core processors are today? It took less than 5 years for CPUs, I think… No link for this idea; this is just me theorizing.
- Tomas Bodzar pointed out this article about 1,000 core CPUs, which I dub ‘kilocore’. He also linked to these logical domain/logical partition articles on Wikipedia.
- In this day and age, a website that supports a limited number of browsers and platforms seems anachronistic. Still happens, though. (via)
- This is neat: an online, persistent space game with exploration and combat. Not EVE, but Lacuna Expanse, playable via web browser. There’s lots of browser games out there, but here’s the interesting part: the game even has a fully exposed API.
Aleksey Cheusov is putting together a package manager for pkgsrc, called nih. (For “Not Invented Here”). It’s binary-only at this point, so you’d need to run distbb or pbulk to generate packages, or download from avalon.dragonflybsd.org.
Francois Tigeot figured out how to get it to work.
Jan Lentfer’s got the 4.4 version of pf ready for testing. Filtering, queuing, redirection, NAT – all working. It has to be built into your kernel, though that’s all of 3 lines of work. Download his branch and try it.
Tim Darby asked some questions about setting up an encrypted root disk; Alex Hornung answered them. They apply to people running current DragonFly, not 2.8, but if you’re wanting to try it, why not?
I found it via Google Search. Anyone know?
Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.
wip/jdk15 now works on i386, too, under specific circumstances.