Jeroen Ruigrok posted an interesting link about moving machine state between machine.

Matt Dillon’s planning to work on AMD64 support for February. He listed these steps:

“* build support and cross compilation work
* kernel build
* boot 64-bit kernel almost to single user
* 32 bit userland support
* boot kernel to single user
* basic device driver and filesystem testing
* boot kernel to multi user (fully working system at this point)
* everyone w/ 64 bit boxes start banging on it, fixing additional
device drivers, get 64 bit buildworlds working, and so forth.”

Matt Dillon’s been working on this patch, described as so:

“These are dyamic[sic] interrupt-driven timers. They replace the old fixed periodic ‘hardclock’ interrupt that exists now and allow per-cpu multiple periodic or one-shot timer interrupts to be registered with the system. Systimers operate outside the MP lock, so any code developed to use it has to be MP safe. Systimers are intended to be able to make use of per-cpu timers (e.g. LAPIC), when available, and will eventually be augmented to use them.”

It also has the added bonus of making nanosleep() very accurate.

‘esmith’ reported successfully building OpenOffice 1.1 using the base version of GCC 3.3 now in.

Eirik Nygaard made a initial port of Valgrind to DragonFly, based on Doug Rabson’s FreeBSD work.

Paul Herman’s nanosleep() presentation is now on the DragonFly website.

Matt Dillon noted that:

makeoptions DEBUG=-g
options DDB
options INVARIANTS
options INVARIANT_SUPPORT


are the only options you need when building with debugging options on.

Skip Ford ported Tim Robbins’ FreeBSD port of Niels Provos’ NetBSD file descriptor allocation code. Normally I don’t post about code until it gets committed, but he posted some numbers on how well it improves things, as benchmarked by Niels Provos’ test program that opens/closes files repeatedly. The numbers seem to indicate a 50% speedup:

Matt Dillon is bringing in resident executable support. This speeds loading of dynamically linked programs by saving a copy of their vmspace with vmspace_fork() in the kernel, and using that when executed instead of going through the regular, slower startup. This will replace prebinding.

Matt Dillon posted these preliminary numbers running a test program with Perl:

It is planned to make dynamic loading as fast as static. For those of you not familiar with the output of time, the first column is total time taken, the second is time taken to run the tested program, and the third is time consumed by system overhead. Yes, there are more columns than that. No, I don’t know what they mean.

Discussion continues on journaling, soft updates, and background fsck. Jeroen van Gelderen linked to “Design Evolution of the EROS Single-Level Store” while talking about journaling meta-data, and Matt Dillon mentioned that he and David Rhodus are putting together a kernel API for journaling, so that some ambitious person can build it. Matt Dillon also pointed out he favors journaling because softupdates is a complex beast, and modern IDE drives are somewhat undependable when it comes to the way they lay down data. As an added bonus, Diego Calleja García linked to a description of reiser4 which talks about journaling, along with some freaky illustrations.

Joerg Sonnenberger wrote up a proposal for background fsck, which he posted to the kernel discussion group. I”m pasting it wholesale.

(Matt Dillon has indicated he would prefer a journaling filesystem.)
More…

Matt Dillon noticed in a thread on the freebsd-hackers mailing list (see here for original post, and look for articles following that have [CHECKER] in the subject) that the M_NOWAIT command is being used incorrectly in a number of places, both in DragonFly and in FreeBSD.

I’m just pasting the rest of his post, as it’s not something that boils down easily:
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As part of a discussion about internationalization, Matt Dillon mentioned he plans to finish IPC this weekend as it would be a useful implementation method. He also mentioned offhand that the first release of DragonFly could be in June/July.

Jean-Marc Zucconi benchmarked FreeBSD 4.9-R, 5.1-R, 5.2-R and DragonFly on a multiprocessor system, and posted the large quantity of data this generated. It’s mashed into a table here:

(updated with better results for 5.2; ACPI was generating so many interrupts it was slowing his system.)

(see end of entry for his notes)
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Bernhard Valenti found he had to put “set hw.ata.ata_dma=0” in the boot loader to get his 645DX-based motherboard ATA working. Jeroen Ketema also found that write caching had to be off: “set hw.ata.wc=0“

Following up on recent discussion, ibotty listed ICU as another internationalization alternative.

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.

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:
More…

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.

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.

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/.

For those of you around San Francisco, Matt Dillon’s talking about DragonFly at the next meeting of BAFUG (Bay Area FreeBSD Users Group), which is tonight, 7 PM, here

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.

Michal Pasternak posted a plea for use of Pkgsrc to the submit discussion group. Given that he specifically said he wasn’t participating in that group and wasn’t going to do any work to make pkgsrc compatible, and that VFS is not yet complete, that’s probably as far as it will go. I’m editorializing.

YONETANI Tomokazu reported his laptop was running very hot with DragonFly. The CPU was running when it didn’t need to be; Matt Dillon fixed this.

Peter Kadau has been talking about changing the userland scheduler (which could be done dynamically, as Matt Dillon pointed out) and a post out of that discussion by Matt Dillon does a nice job of summing up the differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD-5 process management.

Joerg Sonnenberger has been adding a lot of port overrides – freetype2, xmms, etc. Always make sure to check dfports first when you want to add software.