From Xerox PARC: The first Ethernet cable, plus diagrams from Bob Metcalfe.
Month: June 2009
New installation option
Sascha Wildner has added an option to the installer to create a UFS boot and Hammer volume as an install disk, in addition to the all-Hammer and all-UFS options already available. Programs expecting the booting kernel to be on UFS will be able to find it, but users still get the benefits of Hammer.
Updated: It replaces the all-Hammer option. Thanks for the correction, Sascha!
06/29/2009
New Hammer version
Matthew Dillon has a new version of Hammer, which speeds up listings from programs like ‘ls -la’ and ‘find’. This is only in 2.3.1.x code right now, so don’t force an upgrade via hammer version-upgrade if you’re still on DragonFly 2.2. His post includes some benchmarks.
On a side note: sili(4) tests look good.
06/28/2009
Other ways to back up Hammer
As Jim Chapman found out, dump only works for UFS, and not for Hammer. Matthew Dillon outlined the different mirroring and snapshot methods that Hammer makes available.
New keyboard layout possible
I’ve heard of Dvorak keyboard layouts, but I didn’t know there’s another, called Colemak. Sascha Wildner has committed a patch from Geert Hendrickx which makes Colemak layouts available on DragonFly.
06/27/2009
Disks done differently
Matthew Dillon has changed the way USB flash drives are attached, to make sure they don’t interfere with AHCI-attached disks. This is temporary, and will be replaced by a dynamic /dev.
More news, more articles
Dru Lavigne is going to be doing blogging/tweeting for the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation. This is a good thing – BSD in general is helped by more of a conversation about what’s going on. I daresay this Digest has established that there’s definitely enough events, just with DragonFly, for daily news.
Also, Dru’s published summaries of the articles in the upcoming July ‘Collaboration’ issue of the Open Source Business Resource.
06/26/2009
SoC: Mentor Summit
Gleaned from the SoC mailing lists: the tenative dates for the 2009 Mentor Summit for the Google Summer of Code program is October 24th and 25th. Where? Probably Mountain View, CA.
@Play: Fatal Labyrinth
This time, it’s what happens when you take Rogue, export it to Japan, and then see what you get back as a Sega Genesis console game.
I had no idea there were so many permutations of roguelike games. A few years ago, I’d have listed rogue, nethack, moria, [zmw]angband, and ADOM, and felt like I covered it all.
06/25/2009
BSDTalk 175 – Michael Dexter and BSDFund
BSDTalk 175 (the semidemibicentennial?) has a 23 minute interview with Michael Dexter of BSD Fund. Did you know you can get a BSD Fund Visa card (if you are a U.S. resident) that contributes money on each purchase and has a beastie on the card? I did not.
Mirroring with Hammer
Siju George described his efforts to set up a continuous, automatic backup system using Hammer, with some interesting results. Matthew Dillon chimed in with some suggestions.
06/24/2009
One more driver?
Matthew Dillon is looking for one more driver to build to complement the AHCI and Sili drivers. There’s several suggestions already.
06/23/2009
BSD Magazine, free
The whole OpenBSD-focused issue of BSD Magazine is available online as a PDF, plus some other articles from the NetBSD issue. (via)
06/22/2009
Topics to write about
The list of monthly topics for the Open Source Business Resource have been published. The list runs through the end of the year. If one of the topics is something you’re interested in, here’s your chance to get published!
06/21/2009
Minor Hammer changes
Matthew Dillon’s made some small changes to Hammer; it should result in a small speedup when copying data.
06/20/2009
The best way to do open source.
It’s the weekend, so it’s a good time for a digression. This blog post from Matt Trout describes a lot of the code work he’s done for Perl, and what he thinks the best contribution is. The important part is the end of the post. He notes that for all the code he’s added, the best return has come from encouraging others to contribute. The net result has been a magnification of effort, as more people donate time.
The reason I’m posting this is to note that DragonFly, as a community, has been excellent so far at providing a low-drama environment for people to have ideas and contribute work. Keep this in mind; the best benefit to DragonFly isn’t lines of code, but people welcomed.
Git and where it puts things
For the benefit of others: a Git diagram that shows the different levels of storage. Useful, because git goes far beyond the ‘it’s either here or it’s there’ style of cvs/svn. (via)
06/19/2009
DragonFly in real-world testing
‘Haidut’ brings word of a 50-system DragonFly installation acting as web crawlers, with performance exceeding that of the Debian Linux systems they replaced. There’s more details about what’s being run, if you’re curious.
Better speed for cleanup
A number of people have noticed that Hammer’s pruning (which by default runs once at midnight) makes systems temporarily unresponsive. Matthew Dillon’s committed a fix for this, with warnings of more improvements to come.
06/18/2009
Nethax: AJAX and nethack
Another installment in my continuing obsession with roguelikes: Nethack, implemented as an AJAX application. (via)
06/17/2009
Bulk build speed stats
I recently did a bulk build of pkgsrc on two similar machines; the only significant difference being extra CPU work being done on one system, and Hammer snapshots on the other. However, they’re diverging in speed over time, which is interesting but not yet conclusive. Read my post about it for more details.
A good benchmarking project would be testing Hammer with snapshots on and with snapshots off.
sili(4) driver in progress
Taking from his AHCI work, Matthew Dillon’s working on a Silicon Image 3132 driver. An initial version is available now, though the usual caveats about a brand-new device driver apply.
Update: he’s really moving fast on this.
06/15/2009
Intel video driver notes
Hasso Tepper posted his notes on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list about the different video modes for the Intel video driver. Version 2.7 works, but only if you use certain options.
06/13/2009
No local apic? Try this
If you’re one of the few who has seen a ‘no local apic!’ error when booting, Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent commit may have a fix for that. He asks for testers, though he cautions to do it without APIC_IO in your kernel config.
Another day, more AHCI progress
Matthew Dillon is relentlessly adding to his AHCI work, with a new status report summing up the speed and stability improvements. The driver will probably end up in the next DragonFly release.
06/11/2009
More AHCI: port multipliers
Matthew Dillon has initial support in for port multipliers, along with other AHCI work. It’s not ready for production yet, and he lists the various issues going on, including a need for a different way to mount disks – AHCI changes devicenames from ‘ad’ to ‘da’, which can be a hassle.
Update: hot-swap support, too.
Update update: parallel scans for speed.
06/10/2009
Upcoming pkgsrc freeze; new binaries now
The freeze for pkgsrc’s 2009Q2 release starts this Sunday, the 14th. The 2009Q2 release should follow two weeks afterwards, which will be very close to the time of the next planned DragonFly release. (2.4, in case you weren’t counting.)
I’ve just finished a new build of the 2009Q1 packages for DragonFly 2.2, and it’s available on http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/packages – setting BINPKG_SITES or using pkg_chk can get you these latest versions.
I plan to have a 2009Q2 package set for DragonFly 2.4 as soon as possible after release.
06/09/2009
More compilers, easily
Sascha Wildner has posted a patch that makes it very easy to switch out the compiler used to build DragonFly. This builds on earlier work from Alex Hornung.
This should make it into the base system. Everyone’s looking at compilers that aren’t gcc these days, it seems.
06/08/2009
Faster DragonFly pkg utilities
The pkg_radd(1) and pkg_search(1) utilities defaulted to pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org. They’ve been switched (by me) to point at avalon.dragonflybsd.org, which has much more bandwidth.
06/07/2009
AHCI now available as a module
Matthew Dillon’s added AHCI as a kernel module, and has directions for testing. It’s not done, but he has basic hot-plug support in, among other things.
I’ve been posting a lot of “hey test this new technology” items, lately. That’s good. Since I haven’t done it already, here’s a description of AHCI.
License reading
Here’s some lazy Sunday reading about software licenses. Before you panic and quickly click away to something more fun, these are not flamewars.
This InformIT interview with David Chisnall of Étoilé talks about various things, but has an interesting note about BSD code and Apple about halfway down.
I think this is a much better way of encouraging corporate involvement in open source than legal bludgeons like the GPL. The BSD license is easy for even a non-lawyer to read and understand, so there is no confusion when using BSD-licensed code.
I’m thinking about this because there are people who still can’t figure out the difference.
Along the same lines, I was surprised by the number of open source programs found just by license listing in the new Palm Pre. I wish I had a spare $200.
Wandering even farther off topic, is Étoilé what Windowmaker should have evolved into?
06/06/2009
C++ as a territory
An entertaining diversion: a fantasy map of C++. It’s huge; give it time to download. (via)
AMD power level support
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for various power states on AMD Phenom and Turion-series processors. He has some specific notes that mention there’s more processor family support on the way. Good news for anyone with an AMD-based laptop.
06/05/2009
AHCI work in
Matthew Dillon has committed the start of his AHCI work, taken mostly from OpenBSD. He described what he’s doing in a separate post, along with the welcome news of the enhanced performance that comes with AHCI support.
GSoC 2009: so far for devfs and AMD64
Alex Hornung posted a summary of how his work on devfs is going, and Jordan Gordeev posted a summary of how much AMD64 is functional.
If you want to try either one (warning: many parts still broken!), use a vkernel for the devfs so a physical system doesn’t get broken. There’s build instructions for pulling together AMD64 DragonFly.
Update: manual instructions for AMD64, too.
06/04/2009
More roguelikes: @Play and a new game
Not one, but two roguelike items! Close your eyes and click randomly if you have no interest in my little obsession.
- The newest @Play column has more 7DRL coverage, with screenshots and nice little summaries that mention whether a game is fair or not.
- Also at GameSetWatch, mention of a new roguelike called MnemonicRL, with a video preview. It’s planned to be a MMORPG, of all things.
Sampling BSD Hacks
Dru Lavigne’s excellent book ‘BSD Hacks’ is available at Scribd, and a chunk of it is readable through the preview at that site. A good chunk of what’s in there applies to DragonFly.
My copy is sitting on the shelf near by, inbetween ‘Perl Best Practices‘ and ‘The Mythical Man-Month‘.
06/03/2009
More media reading
I linked to articles from last week’s issue of the Economist before, but now that I made it to the other end of the magazine, there’s another one of interest that doesn’t mention open source but still relates to it: An article on intellectual property that covers how to handle antitrust legislation and companies where the property is mostly virtual. Useful to anyone who has dealt with the GPL and/or Microsoft. (i.e. everyone)
Also, not really open source related, but computer games can be good for you. I really like this magazine – not because I agree with them, but because they at least examine things in depth, and avoid the usual computing blunders you see in print.
If you don’t want to read the whole magazine yourself, there’s a nice summary available. (that link covers the previous week; recap of this issue possibly this weekend.
06/02/2009
BSD jails work better
A useful BSD item from the Howling Void: BSD jails found to be more efficient than VMWare in given situations. I am both pleased and not really surprised.
dragonflybsd.kiev.ua returns, better
The DragonFly mirror at dragonflybsd.kiev.ua went down due to hard drive failure some time ago, but it has returned. It’s an honest-to-goodness DragonFly system now too, I think. It’s (re)listed on the mirrors page.
06/01/2009
OSBR: Women
The newest issue of the Open Source Business Resource covers Women in Open Source, with a larger-than-normal variety and length of articles.
ABI/API freeze until 2.4
As Hasso Tepper says, please don’t bring in any major changes until after DragonFly’s 2.4 release. This is mostly for the benefit of pkgsrc, so that we can have as complete a working set of packages as possible at release time. 2.4 will probably be in July.
BSDTalk 174: Kris Moore
BSDTalk 174 is up, with 16 minutes of conversation with Kris Moore of iXSystems (neé PC-BSD), from BSDCon 2009.