HEADS UP: development branch changes

There’s a whole lot of changes in the development branch (HEAD) of DragonFly. These are good changes, especially if you are a multiprocessor user, but HEAD users will shortly need to recompile everything – kernel, world, and ports/pkgsrc! Matthew Dillon lays it out in a recent post.

Going out

shiningsilence.com is moving tomorrow from one physical location to a new one – it’s just a few miles, but it means an outage. The domain will probably go down tonight when I package up hardware, and should hopefully return over the next few days as my new link is installed and DNS updates.

Big changes coming in CURRENT

Matthew Dillon sent out a large warning. Here’s a summation:

* The Preview tag has been slipped.
* All bug fixes made since 1.2.0 was released will be added to that release branch.
* Unless you want to deal with major breakage, stick with the 1.2.0 Release or the -WORKING code; the CURRENT code will have severe modifications going on, including libc revisions.
* Upgrading from FreeBSD-4.x will break! Updating to DragonFly 1.2.0 and then to a more recent version of DragonFly will be the only way.

Bleeding edge is bleeding

Are you using the most recent DragonFly code from CVS? Matthew Dillon warns that the new red/black tree work may be causing file system problems. If this worries you, you should be running with a less dangerous tag in your cvsup file. (See his post for details.)

Release prereleased

The CVS tag for the next release, “DragonFly_RELEASE_1_2” has been placed, which means commits are OK again.

There is a prerelease version of 1.2 on gobsd.com via HTTP or FTP, and also at pfsense.com via HTTP. Here’s the MD5:

MD5 (dfly-20050406-pre1.2.iso.gz) = 9b382c84e629b391bd4ce38c7ca724bd

If you can bear waiting, I would advise waiting for the official release later this week, just in case something is found in the next day or two.

Stable has slipped!

Stable has slipped.

If that doesn’t make sense to you, this means that the current “bleeding edge” code has been moved to “Stable” status, as there’s no outstanding problems with it. If you’re using the “DragonFly_Stable” tag in your CVSup file, you’ll have some new things to download.