Sepherosa Ziehau has another test patch for optimizing network speed; he’s looking for (but not exclusively) ipv6 users. It’s pretty safe, though it will require a quickworld.
Month: November 2008
Details on git usage
- Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert suggests summarizing your changes in the first line of your commit message, as that first line gets used by other tools that read from git.
- Peter Avalos has set up a (speedy!) North American mirror of the DragonFly git repo.
- Aggelos Economopoulos has been adding Git tips for DragonFly to a page on the wiki.
Git git git git
The Git repositiory for DragonFly is up and running, and Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert asks people to use a mirror. The update messages to commit@ are working. There’s places to see the repo via the web, too.
Git conversion (almost) complete
Instructions for using Git to access DragonFly source for users and committers has been posted, with a special note on the origin tag. However, it’s not quite ready yet…
BSDTalk 166: Asterisk
The latest BSDTalk is a 23-minute conversation with Asterisk Open Source Community Director John Todd.
These positions where someone works for a company, specifically to interact with a community of people who may produce unpaid work for that company, intrigue me.
HAL comes to DragonFly
Thanks to the efforts of Hasso Tepper, support for the FreeDesktop HAL (hardware abstraction layer) using the bleeding-edge versions of DragonFly and pkgsrc is available.
Recent bulk build results
Hasso Tepper recently finished a bulk build of pkgsrc on DragonFly 2.1, with only just under 5% of packages actually failing to build. I think the “natural” average is around 3%-4% just from the natural disorder of over 8,000 3rd party software packages, so this is an excellent state to be in.
I’m working on a new set of 2.0.1 pkgsrc packages for download from pkgbox, incidentally.
Something to do
Lazy Sunday? Running carp? Why not try Sepherosa Ziehau’s carp patch? No, I don’t know what it does.
MeetBSD Slides
Dru Lavigne’s got a link to the slides from the recent MeetBSD event, plus links to video of her presentation.
NVIDIA driver test
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a experimental version of the NVIDIA FreeBSD driver changed for DragonFly; the code is available without any support so it’s not as simple as a download, unfortunately.
More MeetBSD interviews in BSDTalk 165
BSDTalk 165 has a 35-minute conversation with Julian Elischer while at MeetBSD. I wonder how many interviews Will backman got out of this event…
Where the sound went
Hasso Tepper has made /dev/audio a symlink to /dev/dsp. DragonFly’s sound device hasn’t been /dev/audio in a while, but until recently in pkgsrc, applications that used audio would default to /dev/audio for playback. With this symlink, they all should work – or at least not be directing sound to a nonexistent device.
This isn’t dramatic news, but I can never remember which device is the right one, and this fixes that little issue for me.
Now that’s fast
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the Broadcom bge(4) network interface driver so that it apparently now goes as fast as possible; e.g. receiving at the full line rate of 1Gbps.
That’s a lot of files
David Tweed posted a short but interesting anecdote of his real-world experiences dealing with a large number of files, to follow up with a recent discussion on handling large directories with Hammer.
SATA ATAPI problems somewhat fixed
Hasso Tepper has made some fixes to SATA ATAPI code that fix some of the issues with SATA CD/DVD readers, though some issues remain. Please test if you’ve got the hardware to match.
Even more BSDTalk: 164
Will Backman has another podcast up; this one being 38 minutes of FreeBSD Core Team interviews from the just-concluded MeetBSD event.
BSDTalk 163: iXsystems
Will Backman visited iXsystems recently, and he has a 8 minute podcast with the details up as BSDTalk 163.
Python and Zope removal
python15 and zope25 are being removed from pkgsrc, unless someone speaks up. If you’re that someone, post to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org list about it.
KDE progress
Hasso Tepper is taking advantage of his new pkgsrc commit bit and working on a KDE change, by removing the need to have arts included when building the rest of KDE. He’s testing on DragonFly, so a side benefit will be better DragonFly integration.
Hammer gets versioned
Matthew Dillon is adding versioning support to Hammer; it’ll support in-place version upgrading. The gory details of his current plan are available, with an interesting tidbit: Hammer directory lookups remain the same speed even with 2 billion files in a directory, while UFS will be O(N^3) speed after several hundred thousand.
More links 2008/11/12
I have a number of things to link which probably can all go together:
- Useful (Stupid) BlackBerry Tricks, to go with the previous ones for Unix, Vi, Emacs, and Regexes.
- Dru Lavigne brings work of the November OSBR issue: “Health and Life Sciences“, along with something else I didn’t know the BSD Fund was supporting: Events.
- BoingBoing is having an Obfusticated Code contest; I seem to have heard of this sort of thing before.
- Two links from sjg on EFNet #dragonflybsd: tarsnap and Sun’s hybrid storage plans. (PDF)
Matthew Dillon noticed that it is possible to have files on a Hammer volume marked ‘nohistory’ even when the volume they are on is retaining history details. He’s fixed the cause, and it will be in 2.0.1 soon. Check for this if you have a Hammer-based /usr/obj.
pkgsrcgfe? Gesundheit.
User “dark0s Optik” has put together a graphical tool for managing pkgsrc, called “pkgsrcgfe”. I’d say to give it a whirl, but I don’t recall seeing a download link yet.
BSDTalk 162: Eeeeeeeeeeeeee
The newest BSDTalk is about trying various BSDs (including DragonFly) on a EeePC 900A. Little netbooks are this close to being an acceptable price/performance combination for me…
Will Backman, the host, is going to be at MeetBSD, which is happening in 5 days…
A way to learn git
Since DragonFly is switching to git instead of CVS, something handy is ‘eg’, or Easy Git. It’s a wrapper around git that makes the transition from CVS easier, or so it says. (via _hasso_ on EFNet #dragonflybsd) The linked page lists some alternate programs that are also designed to make git acclimation easier.
More pkgsrc access
Hasso Tepper has been helpfully submitting DragonFly-specific pkgsrc fixes for some time; his reward/punishment is commit access to pkgsrc. Congratulations, Hasso
Switch to git this week
The change from CVS to git will be happening this week, with git being moved in and mercurial added in a mirrored form, so both will be available. Expect some wierdness on the commits@ mailing list.
Automatic PFS creation
Michael Neumann has come up with a way to automatically create pseudo file systems (PFS) when mirroring a Hammer volume. Previously, the destination/slave file system would have to be created first; this makes it Just Work.
This means Hammer data streams will be incompatible with versions before and after this change, but it’s not going to damage anything. Introducing a versioning system into Hammer data streams is an available project…
Messylaneous for 2008/10/08
Some random links I’ve had built up:
- Dru Lavigne has links explaining cross-platform zip differences
- Microsoft is getting in on the idea of an App Store, same as Apple and Google. I want to point out that you can draw a straight line between the BSD world’s ports/package systems and this idea…
- pcc is seeking funding. (via)
ATI problem solved
I previously posted about Joe ‘Floid’ Kanowitz’s problem with the xorg driver for the ATI RS480 chipset. It turns out he went and figured out a workaround.
Stupid Tricks!
Fresh from the howling void: (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks and (Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks. Caveat Emptor.
Update: Emacs too.
Help Wanted
It looks like there’s already BSD-specific patches for OpenJDK according to commenter Samh; anyone want to see how well these would work for DragonFly?
Also, does someone want to work on interrupt routing for DragonFly? It’s tough and necessary work, but there are enough people that need it that there’s a potential bounty of $400 or more.
A specific xorg/radeon issue
Do you have a Radeon card with a RS480 chipset? Joe ‘Floid’ Kanowitz noticed a problem when upgrading xorg; here’s his heads-up.
OpenJDK and BSD
Stephane Russell pointed at work bringing the OpenJDK to the BSDs – anyone want to help out?
NYCBSDCon Hammer presentation again
Thomas Nikolajsen turned the slides from Matt Dillon’s NYCBSDCon talk about Hammer into a PDF.
BSD Stats reported
Marc G. Fournier reported hitting 25,000 BSD systems checking in to bsdstats.org; most of that is PC-BSD, where the bsdstats client is on by default. (It’s present in DragonFly but not on by default.) Some cross-posted acrimony followed, thankfully not from DragonFly users.
OpenBSD technologies reviewed
OpenBSD 4.4 is out, and OnLAMP (as usual) has a developer interview to match. They touch on a number of products that are also used in DragonFly, like the sensors framework and pf. (via)
@Play: More NetHack Tournament
Hey, there’s a part 2 to the @Play coverage of the the devnull NetHack Tounament! (Part 1 mentioned here if you missed it.)
10 years of textfiles
txtfiles.com is having its 10th anniversary. Read up on Jason Scott’s history, which parallels the development of computer and the Internet for a lot of people (myself included), and then waste your afternoon browsing through all the data he has saved. If I had encountered something like this at 14 on my local BBS, it would have been amazing. For fun, look at the Hacking UNIX section, or perhaps Programming. (via)
vkernel details
Since it was mentioned on the mailing lists, I’ll mention it here: instructions on building a vkernel are in the Handbook. I may not have linked that before.
Scheduler fix for testing
Matthew Dillon has made a scheduler change that apparently improves responsiveness when CPU load is high, to fix an issue reported by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert. Please test if you are running bleeding-edge code.