I had mentioned the new malloc in DragonFly before, but Matthew Dillon has a nice explanation of its performance improvements and the relationship to the existing slab allocator.
Month: April 2009
Dragonflies on DragonFly
Colin Adams has a DragonFly system up and running, and he’s posting about dragonflies – the insect variety.
Pkgsrc input needed
Hasso Tepper, who has been working very hard on pkgsrc on DragonFly, has a few strange pkgsrc issues he’d like help on. Anyone have ideas? (Follow the thread to see what’s been done so far.)
04/29/2009
2.2.1 released!
The 2.2.1 release is on its way out to mirrors now. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has kindly put together a list of the changes in this new version.
04/28/2009
Updated for kqemu patch
Naoya Sugioka has the latest version of his kqemu patch; it fixes some issues noted by Johannes Hofman. It may end up in the base system.
Now available: ifpoll
Sepherosa Ziehau has added ‘ifpoll’, a feature similar to polling(4). It has to be enabled via a kernel option and so far is only enabled for emx(4); read his commit message for more details.
04/27/2009
BSDDay, May 29-30, plus poster
Sdävtaker posted a note about BSDDay, a BSD convention happening in Argentina, on the 29th and 30th of May. There’s also a poster. (PDF)
Much like this but for NetBSD
NetBSD now has a Projects Blog and a Twitter account. I’m not taking credit for the idea, but I do note a definite similarity between that and the DragonFly Digest, to which I say: quick, someone do this for FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD! More attention to all the BSD work being done is positive.
04/26/2009
One-day delay for 2.2.1
Hasso Tepper spotted a tty problem that caused a panic in kdesu; Matthew Dillon committed a fix which means the release is delayed until tomorrow. (Thanks, Lazarus, for catching it first)
What not to do for pkgsrc
Make Hasso Tepper’s life a bit easier and take heed of this list: Maintaining stuff in pkgsrc.
Edit: Meant to publish this a bit ago; missed it. Sorry!
How to kill an open source project
Bring in money and then take it out again. It’s conceivable that Impi Linux would have fizzled on its own, being one of a zillion Linux distributions out there, but becoming a commercial product seems to put different, and tougher, contstrictions on any open source project.
04/25/2009
2.2.1 release tomorrow
The 2.2.1 release of DragonFly, rounding up changes since the release (I don’t have a list), should be tomorrow.
2 FreeBSD items
Mashing together to make one post:
FreeBSD-SA-09:05.telnet and FreeBSD-SA-09:07.libc have been fixed in DragonFly.
These PC-BSD 7.1 vs. Kubuntu 9.04 Benchmarks are interesting but not that conclusive – different versions of gcc were used. (thanks J. Kanowitz) Here’s a different comparison of performance inside a VM from Ivan Voras.
04/24/2009
kqemu is better now
Naoya Sugioka has kqemu working with the intended performance improvements; please test if you use qemu. (Johannes Hofmann has done some initial tests.)
04/23/2009
Do you use gcc3?
Hasso Tepper has lang/gcc3 working in DragonFly 2.3, which means that we could potentially drop the version of gcc3 in contrib/ after the 2.4 release. He asks for other testers, please.
This would have the nice side effect of speeding up buildworld tremendously, as gcc3 and gcc4 get rebuilt each time.
Mono available
Spotted by trevorjk in EFNet #dragonflybsd: Mono from pkgsrc now compiles on DragonFly.
04/22/2009
Recent code changes, tests
- Thanks to Stathis Kamperis, it is now possible to build DragonFly 2.2 on a DragonFly 2.3 system, if for some reason you need to move to a system from before the recent libc changes.
- Matthew Dillon has replaced the existing BSD malloc with a port of the slab allocator, which makes malloc() faster, with minor benefits for a buildworld.
- Matthew Dillon also has a patch for people wanting to look for the elusive ‘file-missing-in-directory-listing’ Hammer bug. Caveat Emptor.
04/21/2009
@Play: more 7DRL
There’s a new @Play column focusing on more of the entries at the Seven Day RogueLike competition. I mention this because roguelikes have been around on Unix-ish systems forever, some of these may work on DragonFly, and because they are much more complex and interesting than I would have thought possible.
04/20/2009
DCBSDCon videos
Murray Stokely very kindly passed me a link to his summary of the 8 videos now online showing presentations from the recent 2009 DCBSDCon.
Of particular interest is Robert Luciani’s talk about M:N threading in DragonFly. Yes, that’s the same Robert Luciani who is participating in Summer of Code with DragonFly to profile kernel contention on multiprocessor systems.
Summer of Code accepted students
There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.
Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott
Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon
Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear
Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon
Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper
04/19/2009
Eating your own dogfood
Bad: having the system used for mirroring DragonFly crash a lot.
Good: Replacing that Linux system with DragonFly.
04/18/2009
More TV card support
Sascha Wildner’s added the cxm(4) driver, which supports Hauppauge PVR-250/350 video capture cards. Hasso Tepper kindly donated the hardware for testing.
I’ll note here that I have a Hauppauge TV card (848 chipset, I think) that’s possibly the oldest continuously functioning computer equipment I own; I’ve been using it for close to a decade without a single problem. I have nothing else that has reached the benchmark.
04/17/2009
Summer of Code assignments Monday
Student projects for Google Summer of Code will be announced this Monday, for DragonFly, and for all other participating organizations. DragonFly has 5 slots, and more than 5 excellent proposals, which is a good kind of problem to have. We’ll see what we can fit.
Encryption ideas for backups
Sdävtaker came up with a potential idea for encrypting backup files, and Matthew Dillon followed up with another way that uses Hammer.
04/16/2009
Hammer for Linux, and others
Daniel Lorch is working on a port of Hammer to Linux’s VFS, though since he’s using FUSE, it will be able to reach other systems, like NetBSD. The code is accessible.
OpenSSL-0.9.8k, maybe.
Peter Avalos imported OpenSSL-0.9.8k. I think. I saw him make room, but the actual commit didn’t come through on the mailing list, so I’m not sure.
In related news, the 1.0 version of OpenSSL appears to be coming up.
04/15/2009
pf bug: not here
Is DragonFly vulnerable to a recently found pf issue? Nope, thank goodness.
New pkgsrc tool: pkg_dry
There’s a new tool being put together for pkgsrc installation and management, called pkg_dry. There’s an initial version for download with instructions from its creator, Emile “iMil” Heitor. It looks to duplicate the functionality of apt-get or yum, by handling binary-only remote package management.
Someone please test this on DragonFly, though not on a production machine… If it does end up matching apt-get (the only thing I like in Debian) in terms of functionality, that will be fantastic! I have wanted something like this for a while.
04/14/2009
Now working on VirtualBox
Antonio Huete Jimenez reports that DragonFly now can install and run without issue on VirtualBox 2.2.0; it had been unable to work in previous releases.
Lost any Hammer files?
Matthew Dillon is trying to track down a Hammer bug where directory entries (files, usually) are missed, whether it’s with ls or find or similar. Has this happened to you? It’s apparently very hard to duplicate, so please speak up if it has.
04/13/2009
How badly did that break things?
Hasso Tepper reported on the results of Peter Avalos’s major libc changes; someone retiring libc_r would help, as would someone figuring out why unistd.h isn’t found on DragonFly.
04/12/2009
qemu and kqemu work
Naoya Sugioka has some preliminary patches for kqemu on DragonFly. In testing, he found it made qemu run slower, which is the opposite of its purpose, so he’d appreciate suggestions.
04/11/2009
Viewer for git
Can someone who uses git more heavily than I do look at Tig, a git viewer, and mention if it is useful? It looks interesting, as one of the features that git ‘lacks’ is a visual client other than at the command line.
04/09/2009
BSDTalk 172: Dan Langille of BSDCan
BSDTalk has interviewed Dan Langille, a driving force behind the yearly BSDCan event. The convention is coming up on the 8th and 9th of May. (13 minutes)
04/08/2009
pkgsrc housekeeping
Two recent pkgsrc changes that won’t directly affect how your packages are installed, but are still worth knowing about:
- Thomas Klausner made some adjustments to license handling for pkgsrc. It’s possible to prevent packages with or without certain licenses from installing, even as a dependency. His post contains details of the by-default accepted licenses.
- Joerg Sonnenberger has removed most instances of NO_CHECKSUM. This will help people with poor network connections, and (I would imagine) will be better for security, too.
04/07/2009
Network issues
My apologies, folks – the site is going up and down, along with my network connection. It’s probably because of Time Warner (my network provider) trying and failing to correctly implement bandwidth measuring tools for their upcoming volume cap. (I keep getting passed a private IP.)
Major libc changes
Peter Avalos has made major changes to DragonFly’s libc; you can look at the commits page or check out his git repo for details. If you are running 2.3, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update.
You may also need to rebuild pkgsrc packages; I’m build a new binary set for 2.3 now.
04/06/2009
Done Drupal and DragonFly?
Have you installed Drupal on DragonFly? How well did it work for you? Colin Adams would like to know. (I’m 99% sure it will work.)
Update: Yes, it works.
A Summer of Code reminder: subscribe
If you’re a student with a Summer of Code application, make sure to subscribe to it. Doing this will ensure you are automatically notified of any mentor requests for more information.
There’s also some recent stats published by Google on the applications so far; DragonFly is one of the surveyed orgs it mentions, and the results are the same – less applications, better quality.
04/05/2009
pkgsrc building plans
My plans for building binary packages for pkgsrc are detailed in this message to the mailing lists. No timeline yet…
04/04/2009
Summer of Code proposals in
The due date for the Summer of Code proposals is past, and DragonFly has 18 proposals. The consensus from other SoC organizations is the same: less applicants everywhere this year, but the proposal quality is up.
Potential mentors can now discuss the proposals and ask for more detail from the students, until April 15th.
04/03/2009
Student applications due very soon
19:00 UTC today is the deadline for all student applications for Google’s Summer of Code program. You can revise applications up to April 15th based on feedback, but the initial proposal has to be in the system as of tonight. That’s 5 hours from now, if I have my time calculations correct.
DragonFly has 15 applications at this point, and general application quality looks to be better this year than last.
04/02/2009
AMD64 work continues
Matthew Dillon and Jordan Gordeev have done further work on AMD64 support; it’s progressing quickly. Check that first link for a hint on how to install correct boot code.
OSBR, roguelikes
I’m going to mesh together two unrelated items in this post:
The April OSBR is out, with this issue being a focus on Open APIs.
The newest @Play column covers winners of the 7DRL, or “7 Day Roguelike” contest, where contestants build a new roguelike game in a week. There are some real oddities, like Decimation. I’m not sure how many of these will build on DragonFly, darnit.
04/01/2009
Ping, and where it came from
An interesting tidbit turned up by Google searches: the invention of ping, from the man who wrote it. The ping -> vocoder story near the end is entertaining.
GSoC: Applications almost due
If you’re a potential student for Google’s Summer of Code, please get your application in ASAP. All student applications are due by 19:00 UTC April 3rd. You can revise a submitted application, even after the April 3rd cutoff, but it has to be in.