DragonFly BSD Digest » DragonFly

pf progress

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 02:21:19 +0000

Jan Lentfer posted about his progress on upgrading pf. He has pickups working, but on on a per-rule basis; he’s looking for feedback on how important this option is for other users.

GPT, please

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 27 Jul 2010 02:12:18 +0000

Is it time to move to GPT instead of the traditional fdisk/disklabel combo? Petr thinks so. There’s some work to do, though.

pf: farther along

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 23 Jul 2010 03:09:46 +0000

Jan Lentfer has more on his progress updating pf in DragonFly to a more recent version. He’s looking for testers, especially ones with a more complex pf setup.

HEADS UP: many changes from kqueue and LVM2

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:40:48 +0000

Matthew Dillon posted a warning about both Samuel Greear’s kqueue work and Alex Hornung’s LVM2 work. Both are now committed to DragonFly 2.7. These are dramatic (and useful!) changes, so some instability may happen for bleeding-edge users. His post does include some minor detail on what was touched.

iwn(4) support added

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 20 Jul 2010 02:35:56 +0000

Joe Talbott’s ported over iwn(4), which is the “driver for Intel 1000, 5100, 5150, and 6000 wifi chipsets.”

More mandoc madness

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:09:06 +0000

Undeadly has an article up about recent work on mandoc in a mini-hackathon. It’s mentioned in context with OpenBSD in the article, but mandoc is also present in DragonFly, and is a potential groff replacement. (And I think groff is the last item in base requiring C++? I may be wrong.) Plus, as I’ve said before, I like mandoc’s output. It would be nice to use that for our online man pages, for instance.

Another GSoC update

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 17 Jul 2010 01:01:59 +0000

David Shao has updated his GSoC project page on the DragonFly website. His project is updating DRM/GEM/KMS for BSD systems. It’s a huge but important piece of work. This update brings news on updates to locking systems and data structures.

New kevent for testing

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:06:29 +0000

Samuel J. Greear’s work on his Google Summer of Code project, unifying the select/poll/kevent subsystem into kevent, is already available for testing. Any testing – just booting, or running X, or other simple tasks – is useful, as this new system touches many things.

An easy way to use clang

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 16 Jul 2010 03:02:04 +0000

Sascha Wildner has set up $CCVER so that it can be used with ‘clangsvn’. If you install clang from svn into /usr/local, it’ll get picked up and used as the system compiler.

Oh look, it’s LVM2!

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 15 Jul 2010 03:18:52 +0000

Alex Hornung has imported LVM2 from NetBSD, along with cryptsetup and dm. (Not dm(8), but devicemapper) LVM(8) stands for Logical Volume Management, and it makes storage management much easier; you may have encountered it on NetBSD or Linux. Those additional tools make it possible to encrypt volumes. Alex has published details on how to use it.

Also: Alex’s not-really-related-but-I -mistakenly-linked-to-it udev/libdevattr work.

Reminder: use serno

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 14 Jul 2010 03:27:56 +0000

Using ‘serno’, meaning specifying disks by serial number rather than path, is a good idea. If you have a machine that started out as an older DragonFly installation, it may be a good idea to use this feature.

HEADS UP: ehci.ko is always there

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 07 Jul 2010 04:21:16 +0000

EHCI support is now always on, for 2.7 users, and will be for 2.8 when released. It’s possible to turn it off if it causes a problem, but it should generally just mean better USB performance.

mkinitrd added for the future

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 03 Jul 2010 17:33:25 +0000

Alex Hornung recently added mkinitrd(8), a tool for building a RAM disk early in the boot process. What’s it for? It’s needed to support more interesting bootable volumes, like LVM2, encrypted disks, or iscsi roots, all of which I’d like to see.

SoC kqueue progress

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 19:42:21 +0000

Samuel Greear has a whole page about his Google Summer of Code kqueue project, recently updated.

A trick for updating moved packages

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 02 Jul 2010 01:07:04 +0000

Sometimes, packages are renamed in pkgsrc, usually because of a version change. If that happens, it can be hard to find the replacement. You can manually add them, or there’s a trick to make the build ‘jump’ to the new name.

Real world use and DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:27:39 +0000

Siju George has written up his ‘real world’ experience with DragonFly in production; I should probably do the same since this site has been DragonFly-driven for years now. Add your story to the page.

Potential applicable power project

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 30 Jun 2010 01:26:00 +0000

Matthew Dillon followed up on some comments from Sepherosa Ziehau about power management to describe a possible new way to manage power consumption; the project is up for grabs.

New power controls

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 02:20:35 +0000

Matthew Dillon has added powerd(8), a daemon that adjusts CPU frequency based on activity; his initial report describes a whopping 40% power savings for server use.

Which desktop to use?

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:30:27 +0000

Dennis Melentyev asked about people’s experiences putting together different X desktops on DragonFly. There’s a good range of responses. None the same, of course.

pkgsrc git repo changes

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 26 Jun 2010 17:27:00 +0000

Matthew Dillon set up a git copy of the pkgsrc repository some time ago. However, it’s had syncing problems, and there’s an ‘official’ pkgsrc git repository now which does not have the problems. You can still pull from the same place, but it’s the ‘master’ branch now. His heads-up message describes how to switch.