David Rhodus and Matt Dillon are getting GCC2 and GCC3 into the base system today; updating your source during the next 24 hours may bring you an unstable version.
Ryan Dooley brought up The CITRUS Project as a way to assist internationalization in DragonFly.
According to this benchmark, linked to by Xin LI, there’s file descriptor allocation code in FreeBSD 5 that may be worth the effort to port.
This is the 200th post here – neat! I’m averaging just under 1.5 posts per day, which is good: healthy posting, healthy project.
In a discussion about benchmarks, it was noted that /etc/malloc.conf changes can help benchmarks tremendously. Rahul Siddharthan suggested ‘/etc/malloc.conf -> H' and Jeremy Messenger suggested '/etc/malloc.conf -> aj‘
Also, Matt Dillon made a number of suggestions on what to check when benchmarking DragonFly vs. FreeBSD (4 or 5)
Matt Dillon quote follows:
Continue reading “Benchmark setups”
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert pointed out prelinking should be mentioned on the 2003 report; here’s the text that will soon show up on that report:
Prelinking
Prelinking capability was added to DragonFly by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, which allows faster loading of applications that use a large number of dynamic libraries while running, like Qt/KDE. It is not currently hooked into the system or any port building process.
Matt Dillon fixed an apparently long-term problem in OpenSSH where a server can hang because it has a lot of data to send, but no immediate resources to do it with.
Reproduce it like so:
limit filesize 64k
ssh remotebox -n cat /usr/share/dict/words | cat > junkfile
The IBM ServeRAID controller is now supported, thanks to TONETANI Tomokazu. That would be the “ips” device.
David Rhodus has the journaling filesystem code from Apple located in vfs_journal.c and vfs_journal.h. He estimate it’d take 2-3 (long) days of work to get it worked into the system, which would mean no more long fscks after unlcean shutdowns. Any takers? Everyone would love you for it.
Eirik Nygaard was looking for something to do; Max Laier pointed out removal of #if defined(__FreeBSD__) / #if __FreeBSD_version > 5 would help, and Jeffrey Hsu indicated backporting the UFS2 size extensions would also be good.
I’ll quote my own followup to say there’s plenty of non-coding tasks available, too.
The main DragonFly website now has an additional mirror listed (bottom of page) for daily snapshots, and Matt Dillon’s put up slides from his talk at BAFUG in a new Docs section.
Port-fixing fiend Joerg Sonnenberger has committed a dfports override for OpenOffice.
David Rhodus imported Hyperthreading changes from FreeBSD which allow you to automatically use Hyperthreading on supported CPUs with just the regular multiprocessor options turned on in your kernel; e.g. options SMP, options APIC_IO.
However, the DragonFly version has no idling loops in it to reduce CPU resource contention. Because of the way DragonFly schedules per-CPU/sends IPI messages, there’s no performance issue caused by multiple CPUS HLTing. Already, a benefit.
In a discussion about a submitted firewall design, Jeroen Ruigrok listed Data Size Neutrality at unix.org.
Dave Leimbach has added changes to KDE in CVS to allow kdebase to compile on DragonFly. This is in the actual KDE source code, not a ports override.
Joerg Sonnenberger is looking for anyone with either PCCARD or CARDBUS hardware, for testing of this patch and this patch.
He noted, “After applying both patches remove bus/pccard and link bus/pcmcia to bus/pccard.”
The dragonflybsd.org website now contains a FAQ, which is mostly my fault.
Inspired in part by the semi-regular status reports for FreeBSD, I put together (with help from a number of people, including Hiten Pandya and David Rhodus) a DragonFly status report for 2003.
I’ve cleaned up my local archive of the DragonFly discussion groups so that start and end dates are correct; they are available at http://www.shiningsilence.com/mailarchive/.
Paul Herman, Senior Researcher of the Kitchen Refrigerator, has a really nice writeup about time and clocks in operating systems (with graphs, even!), and work he wants to bring into DragonFly.