Because of a number of problems, snapshot building hasn’t worked for some days.  To fix this, some updates need to happen within DragonFly.  This will mean a minor version bump to 2.6.3 in the next little while.

There’s a deficit of vowels in the title of this post…  Anyway, Alex Hornung has changed the format of some of the sysctls used in the I/O scheduler, dsched.  Be ready for this if you’ve been messing with it in 2.7.

Aggelos Economopoulos has posted his patch for Page Attribute Table support; it needs to be able to perceive CPUs, which is apparently not that problematic.  A potential task for others?

Linux Weekly News describes the 2.6 release of DragonFly in an extensive article, which even mentions this Digest.  (yay!)  Also in the comments, a link to a short interview with Matthew Dillon on a French site with an English translation.

Also, seen on the howling void: Software SSD Cache Implementation for Linux? asks for what we’ve already got: swapcache.  Neener neener.

Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on new version of DragonFly’s malloc; he’s published an extensive writeup (which is inexplicably split in two in the mail archives) that includes several of my favorite thing: graphs!  For those short on attention: the new malloc has around a 20-25% improvement over the existing malloc in MySQL sysbench results.

DragonFly 2.7.1 has been tagged, mostly because of a problem with version numbers caused by the recent wireless driver merge.

Thomas Nikolajsen wrote some tips on starting a NFS client on DragonFly; I’m linking to them both because they’re generally handy and specifically so I can have them for later…

Jan Lentfer’s posted the exact steps to migrate from BIND as part of the base system to BIND out of pkgsrc.  The actual commit hasn’t happened yet.

This will only affect you when upgrading 2.7; DragonFly 2.6 still has BIND in it, and this won’t affect non-2.7 users until the next release.

Antonio Huete Jimenez has posted his results from testing Alex Hornung’s experimental I/O scheduler.  Results are positive, and he also lists exactly how to download the code and test it on your own system.  It’s worth trying, especially if you have DragonFly for a desktop.

Here’s some explicit instructions for upgrading from 2.4 to 2.6.

If for some reason you don’t have a /usr/src directory:

mkdir -p /usr/src
cd /usr/src && git init
git remote add origin git://git.dragonflybsd.org/dragonfly.git
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6
git pull

If you already have a /usr/src/ directory, you can just do the last 3 steps:

git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_2_6
git pull

And then you can perform the normal “make buildworld…” steps outlined in /usr/src/UPDATING.

Jan Lentfer’s ready to remove BIND from the base system; test out his changes if you’re running a DragonFly-based name server and want to see how it’ll work.

DragonFly 2.6 is out!  Download from a mirror, check the release page, and enjoy the large number of new features.  There’s a full set of binary packages built, too.

Technically, this is 2.6.1, since 2.6.0 was tagged a week ago and 2.6.1 has all the last minute fixes since then.

2.6 will probably be out within the next 24 hours. We’re just waiting on the packages, though we’re probably in the clear already.

Be ready for mild confusion with this and the current Linux kernel.  I know it’ll happen.