Aggelos Economopoulos has posted his patch for Page Attribute Table support; it needs to be able to perceive CPUs, which is apparently not that problematic. A potential task for others?
Linux Weekly News describes the 2.6 release of DragonFly in an extensive article, which even mentions this Digest. (yay!) Also in the comments, a link to a short interview with Matthew Dillon on a French site with an English translation.
Also, seen on the howling void: Software SSD Cache Implementation for Linux? asks for what we’ve already got: swapcache. Neener neener.
… is one of the better commit message descriptions I’ve heard.
Newegg is running a special on 80G Intel X-25M SSDs – $215, just today. Internet Consensus seems to measure that model of SSD against all others, so it’s a good buy. (assuming you’re living someplace Newegg ships to.) Buy it for swapcache, buy it because it’s a SSD.
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on new version of DragonFly’s malloc; he’s published an extensive writeup (which is inexplicably split in two in the mail archives) that includes several of my favorite thing: graphs! For those short on attention: the new malloc has around a 20-25% improvement over the existing malloc in MySQL sysbench results.
Dru Lavigne is interviewed for 28 minutes on BSDTalk 188. It’s about her new book, and also about the new BSD Professional Certification.
DragonFly 2.7.1 has been tagged, mostly because of a problem with version numbers caused by the recent wireless driver merge.
Thomas Nikolajsen wrote some tips on starting a NFS client on DragonFly; I’m linking to them both because they’re generally handy and specifically so I can have them for later…
Gergo Szakal mentioned some ideas he had about binary upgrades; among other parts of the conversation, Samuel J. Greear/Sascha Wildner reminded everyone that Matthias Schmidt had ported the FreeBSD binary upgrade system over in late 2007, and it’s still around to play with.
Jan Lentfer’s posted the exact steps to migrate from BIND as part of the base system to BIND out of pkgsrc. The actual commit hasn’t happened yet.
This will only affect you when upgrading 2.7; DragonFly 2.6 still has BIND in it, and this won’t affect non-2.7 users until the next release.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has posted his results from testing Alex Hornung’s experimental I/O scheduler. Results are positive, and he also lists exactly how to download the code and test it on your own system. It’s worth trying, especially if you have DragonFly for a desktop.
Here’s some explicit instructions for upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6.
If for some reason you don’t have a /usr/src directory:
mkdir -p /usr/src cd /usr/src && git init git remote add origin git://git.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git git fetch origin git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
If you already have a /usr/src/ directory, you can just do the last 3 steps:
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 git pull
And then you can perform the normal “make buildworld…” steps outlined in /usr/src/UPDATING.
We’ve got 28 applications for Summer of Code, approximately what we had last year. If you’re a student, hold tight. We’ve got until the 21st to get everyone matched up, student <-> mentor.
Jan Lentfer’s ready to remove BIND from the base system; test out his changes if you’re running a DragonFly-based name server and want to see how it’ll work.
‘dylanr’ has built 2 interesting films using Gource to visualize DragonFly development; he’s mentioned them in comments here, but I want to make sure people see them.
Update: see the full multi-year film of DragonFly commits linked in the comments by dylanr; thanks for doing this!
Jan Lentfer’s done some new benchmarking of PostgreSQL on Hammer. There’s further suggestions and a more complete benchmark is planned, taking advantage of the Hammer improvements in 2.6. In the meantime, you can look at previous benchmarks.
DragonFly 2.6 is out! Download from a mirror, check the release page, and enjoy the large number of new features. There’s a full set of binary packages built, too.
Technically, this is 2.6.1, since 2.6.0 was tagged a week ago and 2.6.1 has all the last minute fixes since then.
Gource is a tool for visualizations from version control history; the video page has some examples. (via) I’d love to see this run on DragonFly. I’m curious to see what would happen on a huge, old repo, like NetBSD. Please hlep me, intarwebs!
2.6 will probably be out within the next 24 hours. We’re just waiting on the packages, though we’re probably in the clear already.
Be ready for mild confusion with this and the current Linux kernel. I know it’ll happen.
Daniel Lorch’s work on porting Hammer to Linux (read-only, currently) has been moved to a new location.