TLS system calls are being renamed by Matthew Dillon. If you’re running HEAD (bleeding edge code), this will require both a kernel and world rebuild on your next update.
Matthew Dillon is performing some significant cleanup of the kernel startup/VM code, so watch out if you are using the bleeding edge code. He synced Preview before starting, so Preview users can move to the code version just before this (potentially) destabilizing code.
Matthew Dillon reported that DragonFly Preview code (version 1.7) have been synchronized with the bleeding-edge code, as it’s been stable. Also, the 1.8 release is definitely scheduled for January, at which point he plans to have “at least a basic userland kernel binary”.
Matthew Dillon is making major changes to the namecache over the next 24 hours or so; watch out until it stabilizes. These changes should make nullfs mounting more memory-efficient, among other things, and lays a foundation for union or shadowing filesystems.
DragonFly 1.6.2 is released, along with 1.4.5, to include the recent changes that had been merged back to the branches. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert moved the release up, and a changelog is available for 1.4 and 1.6. (changelogs are in forward chronological order, so skim down.)
Matthew Dillon warns that he is doing some virtual kernel memory mapping work; it may destabilize the bleeding-edge of DragonFly.
dragonflybsd.org is going down 9AM – 1PM PST for power and UPS testing.
Matthew Dillon is starting some work that will possibly destabilize HEAD for a bit. The work involves vnode reference counting and locking. The advantage is that it will remove the hard locks that filesystems can experience, such as waiting for NFS mounts to time out.
Joerg Sonnenberger is temporarily taking packages.stura.uni-rostock.de down for disk reorganization; there’s a bulk build of pkgsrc packages running for 1.6. Most packages built for 1.4.4 will work with 1.6, in any case.
DragonFly 1.6 is released, (see announcement) with highlights including:
- even better pkgsrc integration, with over 93% of pkgsrc‘s 6,000+ packages building on DragonFly
- significant 802.11 improvements including ath(4) support
- clustering progress
- and many other changes.
- See the diary or the release page for exhaustive update detail.
ISO images and/or source updates are available from a number of mirrors, though I suggest the torrent.
DragonFly 1.6 has been branched in CVS, with the release happening at the end of the week.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s vinum changes were recently committed by Matthew Dillon. Simon follows up with a warning: ABI compatibility is broken by this, so vinum will have to be recompiled, if you are using it.
The 1.6 release is pushed back to next weekend, instead of this week as originally intended.
leaf.dragonflybsd.org’s drive was killed by a power outage. Matthew Dillon worked on restoring it yesterday, and it’s mostly back. If you had an account there, please check in and make sure your files are at least somewhat intact.
As a side effect, incremental backups are now possible with cpdup.
As predicted, the Preview tag has been synced with HEAD, meaning all recent changes are now available. Now’s a good time to update if you’re not on Release (1.4.4). Because of ABI changes, there’s a specific procedure one should follow.
If you’re running a development version of DragonFly; namely 1.5.3, it’s time to update to 1.5.4. Be careful, as your kernel has to be updated first.
As Matthew Dillon posted, SMP builds may be broken for the next few days, so rebuild with caution.
Matthew Dillon warned that he is committing a lot of work on multiprocessor support over the next few days; if you are one of the people who run bleeding-edge versions of DragonFly (1.5 from CVS, or ‘HEAD’), there will probably be some instability. It’s not called bleeding-edge for nothing…