NVIDIA breakage

The latest dev numbering changes from Matt Dillon will break the NVIDIA binary driver, if you are using it. Emiel Kollof is working on a new version, and until that’s set, avoid updating if you want to keep your NVIDIA driver working.

bktr, gdb updtd

Joerg Sonnenberger has updated the bktr(4) driver to match what’s current in FreeBSD, including a new msp driver (from Linux), and support for the Terratec TValue, which was submitted by Patrick Mauritz.

cc3 has been switched back to stabs output, temporarily until DWARF2 support comes into gdb5 or DragonFly gets gdb6.

Update, reboot, fsck

Matt Dillon’s tracked down a nasty filesystem corruption bug in the lockf code; everyone should update, rebuild, reboot, and do a fsck to make sure your disk is intact.

CPUTYPE considered harmful

Jeroen Ruigrok tried using ‘CPUTYPE=p4’ in make.conf as an option to gcc. The resulting kernel crashed; and several people pointed out that the CPUTYPE optimization does not work – especially with gcc 2.x. Matt Dillon went on further to explain how little it helps:

“Trying to use cpu-specific optimizations in 2.95.x is roughly equivalent to a blind man driving an 18 wheeler down the highway. In other words: “don’t do it, it doesn’t work”. GCC2 is known to produce bad code not only with CPUTYPE, but also with higher optimization levels like -O2. Blame the GCC folks for this.

GCC3 does a better job but even so I would not use CPUTYPE without being prepared to turn it off when something breaks, and at best I might use -O2 or -Os (under GCC3 only, and even then we don’t really officially support it, since differentiating between compiler code generation bugs and DFly bugs is extremely difficult).

Besides, you won’t notice any improvement in kernel performance.”

No && problems

‘walt’ found and Chris Pressey fixed a bug in the port system that could cause some ports to fail building with a error similar to ‘cd: can't cd to &&‘. Extraneous text was being inserted by the ‘build-depends-list’ and ‘run-depends-list’ targets.