Category: DragonFly

03/05/2013

Patch cross-pollination


I wasn’t aware of this, but apparently DragonFly’s version of patch(1) comes from OpenBSD and NetBSD.  FreeBSD’s old version of patch is being replaced by this and modified to match the old one’s behaviors.  It would be worthwhile to bring these changes back, if possible, just to reduce the differences in a utility that’s already been around the world, so to speak.

As an aside, I always thought patch was one of Larry Wall’s unsung successes, and I’m entertained by any program that has “Hmm…” as one of its official outputs.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: BSD, DragonFly, FreeBSD     0 Comments
02/27/2013

Software RAID options


Following this recent thread, it looks like the best answer for software RAID is: buy hardware.  I’d be interested to hear what people have experience with in the realm of cheap but OK RAID hardware.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     5 Comments
02/25/2013

3 very different commits


Here’s 3 recent and different commits to DragonFly that I’m commenting on all at once:

  1. Peter Avalos upgraded libarchive in DragonFly to 3.1.2, with a note of the changes.  An ordinary and appreciated update.
  2. Sascha Wildner updated the ISO639 file to include the newest update: “Standard Moroccan Tamazight”.  There’s no particular utility to that; I just like saying “Standard Moroccan Tamazight” out loud.
  3. Work on poudriere, the utility for bulk-building DPorts packages, has caused some nice speedups for DragonFly in extremely stressful situations.  See one of Matthew Dillon’s recent commits.

I really wish the other BSD projects would include commit lines in the mail message subjects, so it was easier to catch things like these.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: BSD, Committed Code, DPorts, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/23/2013

DPorts packages for 64-bit DragonFly available


If you want to take advantage of the binary packages of DPorts, and have a x86_64 system with a recent DragonFly 3.3 on it: Francois Tigeot has you covered.  There’s no i386 packages yet, which are the ones I could use right now, darnit.

If you want to try DPorts, see my earlier article.

 

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DPorts, DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
02/22/2013

Read shortcut, buffer cache improvements


The new vm.read_shortcut option has been turned on by default by Matthew Dillon, which should lead to some performance improvements.  That improvement has been measured for tmpfs, at least.  There’s also some buffer cache improvments that help on x86_64 systems, too.

Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out, tmpfs also no longer uses the mplock, so it’ll take better advantage of multiple processors.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
02/21/2013

More vkernel options: MACs, disk serials


Thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez, it’s now possible to set the MAC address for each interface and  specify the disk serial number in the command line for a vkernel.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
02/20/2013

World backups when upgrading


John Marino proposed a method for backing up world when upgrading, for those rare but catastrophic cases where the installed programs can’t run.  After some discussion, he committed an automatic backup method, and there’s a ‘restoreworld’ target to take advantage of it.

The kernel already gets renamed to kernel.old as a backup, if I remember correctly.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Summer of Code ideas, please


If DragonFly is going to participate in Google Summer of Code for 2013, we need project ideas, and lots of them, at any size.  There’s an existing project page that anyone can add to, especially if you’re a student and looking to add your ideas.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Google Summer of Code     0 Comments
02/19/2013

More IP forwarding stats


Sepherosa Ziehau has posted more statistics on his ifnet/ifaddr per-CPU stats work.  It’s doing so well that he’s very close to reaching the maximum physical capacity of the 4x gigabit ethernet hardware he’s using.

 
Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/15/2013

Per-CPU network stats


As Sepherosa Ziehau mentions in his latest commit, DragonFly now collects IFNET/IFADDR statistics on a per-CPU basis.  This makes it more accurate, but may mess with any third-party program that accessed it directly.  I don’t know if there’s anything in pkgsrc that does that…

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Updates: OpenSSL, libdialog, tzsetup, locale


I know OpenSSL in DragonFly was just updated, but Peter Avalos has done it again, bringing it to version 1.01e.  I assume this new version is to fix some recently-exposed problems.   He also has updated libdialog, which was previously not located in contrib/, as sime third-party software needed a more modern version.  As a side effect from that, tzsetup in DragonFly now matches the version in FreeBSD and NetBSD.  And, Sascha Wildner has updated the locale files on DragonFly, also to match FreeBSD and NetBSD.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/13/2013

New mirror in Germany, plus IPv6


If you’re near Germany, or like IPv6, the Schlund Technologies mirror for DragonFly is for you – it supports HTTP, FTP, and rsync.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     2 Comments

DragonFlyBSD.org renumbering details


The machines at dragonflybsd.org are now on a different part of the Internet, so if you were having problems connecting over the past few days, it should be better now.  Matthew Dillon wrote up details of what he changed and why he changed it, including a note about future blade server plans.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
02/12/2013

Comings and goings


Added: Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.1d – see the changelog.

Removed: support for ISA sound cards, by Sascha Wildner.  Goodbye sb16; I’ll remember you fondly.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/11/2013

Google Summer of Code 2013 announced


It’s announced!  If DragonFly is going to participate again for the sixth year in a row (wow!), we need mentor volunteers…

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Google Summer of Code     3 Comments

dragonflybsd.org moving


Matthew Dillon is moving dragonflybsd.org’s network link to a new VPN today.  (It may have already happened; I only just read the email.)  This may help the people that have reported their network path to dragonflybsd.org seems to die somewhere in the Cogent network…

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
02/09/2013

Multiple TX queue support for emx(4), sort of


The emx(4) driver now has support for multiple TX queues, but it’s not on by default.  There’s scenarios where multiple queues work out with that hardware, but you have to be sure you are actually in the right setup for that first.  Check Sepherosa Ziehau’s commit message for the details.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/08/2013

Intel network chipset improvements


Sepherosa Ziehau has merged the hardware abstraction layer (HAL) for em(4) and igb(4), along with updating em(4)/emx(4) to version 7.3.4 and igb(4) to version 2.3.7.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/07/2013

GCC 4.7 the new default


John Marino has set gcc 4.7 as the default compiler in DragonFly.  This replaces the previous default of gcc 4.4.  The 4.4 version is still available, and while you can set NO_GCC44 to keep it from being built, John’s commit message notes that it’s still useful especially for some ports that don’t work with gcc 4.7.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/05/2013

Dealing with problematic git upgrades


If you have git installed, and you are trying to upgrade it, you may have problems.  The scmgit-docs package dependency requires some DocBook files that aren’t always accessible.  If you do run into this problem, there’s 3 separate options:

 

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, pkgsrc, Someday you will need this     0 Comments
02/04/2013

Multiple transmit queue work results


Sepherosa Ziehau has posted a detailed message showing the speeds he gets with multiple transmission queues, using igb(4).  The short version:

Quick summary, the multiple TX queue support gives me:
+200Kpps for 2 bidirectional normal IP forwarding (now 4.40Mpps)
+160Kpps for 2 bidirectional fast IP forwarding (now 5.23Mpps)

 

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
02/02/2013

GCC 4.7 for DragonFly 3.4?


GCC version 4.7 is already available now in DragonFly 3.2, but it’s not the default compiler.  John Marino intends to make it default for the next release.  What’s that mean for us?  Nothing other than a new compiler, since he’s already fixing related issues.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
01/30/2013

Xen users, take note


Markus Pfeiffer reports success using Xen HVM to run DragonFly, which may be useful for any of you Xen users.  He reports not being able to use more than 2 virtual CPUs, though Scott Tincman reports successfully using 4 (with qemu), so your mileage may vary.

Updated: noting qemu usage as Markus pointed out in comments.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     1 Comment
01/22/2013

Network fairness changes and what they mean


Sepherosa Ziehau makes commits almost daily to DragonFly’s network infrastructure, but I have a hard time quantifying it into Digest posts in part because it’s often very technical.  His most recent commits come with an explanation, however.  He has done plenty of work to improve overall transmission speeds in DragonFly, and now he’s working on ‘fairness’.  Fair, in this case, means ensuring that packet transmitting and receiving happen without either one monopolizing the connection.  In real world terms, this translates to much more constant speeds.  His recent commit details what he’s doing and some numbers to prove it.

Remember I said he’s improved speeds?  Note that in his example, he’s reaching stable peaks of 981 Mbps.  This is on a line that I assume theoretically maxes out at 1000.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
01/19/2013

Extra rebuilding step for 3.3 users


Based on this bug report on the recently updated m4, you may need to perform some extra steps to update m4 as part of a normal upgrade:

# cd /usr/src/usr.bin/m4
# make
# make install clean

 

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Someday you will need this     0 Comments
01/18/2013

A favor with xorgs and DPorts


If you have a DragonFly 3.3 system with DPorts, can you install xorg, then ssh -Y from another machine to there, and see if you can remotely run an X program like xterm with local display?  I’ve done this twice on two different machines with DPorts and it won’t work.  xorg won’t write the security info to ~/.Xauthority, with ssh or xhost or whatever.   It’s driving me crazy.

(Yeah, slow news day.)

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: About This Site, DragonFly     3 Comments
01/17/2013

Updates for m4 and flex


Peter Avalos has updated m4 for DragonFly.  This will bring us a little more in sync with the other BSDs.  Also, John Marino has updated flex, which is apparently 17 years old?   Meaning it hasn’t been updated in DragonFly ever, and then not in FreeBSD before that, for a long time.  Looking at the timeline on the flex web page appears to match.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: BSD, Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
01/16/2013

HAMMER best practices, and RAID


Dave Hayes asked for some “best practices” ideas for setting up a HAMMER (1) system.  I replied, and the conversation turned to RAID, as these often do.  If you’re thinking of purchasing disk hardware in the near future, this will be useful to you.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
01/15/2013

Multiple TX queue support started


Sepherosa Ziehau has added a generic form of support for multiple transmit queues in DragonFly.  This means less contention when transmitting.  It’s not done; he has drivers to set up and as he said, it’s “step 1 of many“.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Git and DragonFly on IPv6


If you are a brave soul and have an IPv6-only DragonFly installation, there’s now a git mirror of DragonFly that is available on IPv6.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Someday you will need this     0 Comments
01/14/2013

More tips for DPorts


I meant to post this a while ago; it’s a few days old but still useful.  John Marino gave some stats on DPorts progress, plus he and Francois Tigeot also had some tips on xorg setup.  The successful build count is  higher by now, and I think KDE3 is done, though I haven’t tried it.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DPorts, DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
01/12/2013

3.3 users, please update


If you are on DragonFly 3.3, and you are running a kernel built after January 1st, there’s a bug in the way FP context is handled when the kernel supports AVX.  (January 1st is when AVX support was committed.)  Matthew Dillon has committed a fix and issued a note to update for everyone.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Heads Up!     0 Comments

An early DPorts education


John Marino’s DPorts project, mentioned here briefly before, is interesting.  I had two separate people ask me how it works, so a better explanation is in order.  I’ve tried it out on a test machine over the past few weeks.

Background:

Dports is an effort to use FreeBSD’s ports system as a base for DragonFly, and the pkg tool as a way to manage binary packages built from DPorts.  This is complicated, so I’ll explain each part in order.

  • FreeBSD ports are a FreeBSD-specific collection of software installation files that automate building 3rd-party software on FreeBSD.  You’ve probably already heard of them.  (Note there’s no mention of DragonFly.)
  • DPorts is a collection of files that map to existing FreeBSD ports, and contain any changes necessary to make that port also build on DragonFly.  Many of those programs build without changes on DragonFly.  DPorts builds from source.
  • pkg is used for package management, and is usable on FreeBSD and on DragonFly.  The binary packages produced from building with DPorts can be installed from remote locations and managed separately using pkg, so that software upgrades and installation can be performed with binaries only.  (It’s much faster that way.)

Every port seen in DPorts is known to build on DragonFly.  John Marino adds a port only after it builds successfully, using poudriere as a bulk software tool.   Ports are only updated to a newer version when that newer version builds, too, so once something arrives in DPorts, it should never break from being updated at some point in the future.

Installing:

To use DPorts, you need two things:

  1. DragonFly 3.3 or later, though 3.3 is the most recent right now.
  2. You need to rename /usr/pkg so that your existing pkgsrc binary programs don’t get accidentally used while working with DPorts, causing confusion.  If anything goes wrong with DPorts when you are installing it and you want to go back, remove all the DPorts packages and rename /usr/pkg back to normal.

(Don’t confuse pkg, the management tool, with /usr/pkg, the normal installation directory for pkgsrc. ) For the installation of the base port files:

cd /usr
make dports-create-shallow

If you’ve already renamed your /usr/pkg directory, git won’t be in your path any more.  You can instead download a tarball and unpack it, which also happens to be possible automatically via that same Makefile.

cd /usr
make dports-download

Downloading via git is fastest, so if you do need to use the tarball via make dports-download, build devel/git, delete /usr/dports, and then pull it again with make dports-create-shallow.  This all comes from John Marino’s Github site for DPorts.

Managing DPorts

DPorts doesn’t use pkg_info, pkg_add, and the other tools traditionally seen on DragonFly for pkgsrc.  Instead, package management is done with pkg.   Use pkg info, pkg install, pkg remove, and pkg update to list, install, delete, and upgrade various packages on your system.  Packages built from source or downloaded as prebuilt binaries are managed the same way, using these tools.

See some of the other writing about pkg for FreeBSD for details on how it works.

Since DPorts doesn’t update a package until it gets a successful build, and installations are of successfully built binary packages, upgrades with prebuilt packages should always succeed.  Since they’re binary, they should be fast.  There’s a lot of ‘shoulds’  in this sentence, but these are reasonable suppositions.

What about pkgsrc?

Pkgsrc and DPorts shouldn’t be used at the same time, since one system’s packages may be at different versions but still get picked up during building for the other system.  That’s about it for restrictions.

I intend to try building an experimental release of DragonFly with DPorts, to see if all the right packages can be added, but no guarantees.  DPorts is brand new and does not yet have a repository for downloading packages, so the normal caveats apply; don’t install it on a mission-critical machine, and be ready to deal with any surprises from using it if you do try it out.

What packages are available?

Browsing the Github repo will show you all listed packages.  More complex packages like xorg, openjdk7, and libreoffice install, as does xfce.  Parts of KDE 3 and KDE 4 are in there.  (I haven’t tried either.)  I’m not sure about Gnome, but I don’t think anyone ever is.  There’s no vim, but there is emacs.

That’s just what I see at this exact minute.  It changes daily as more packages are built.  Changes from DragonFly builds are sometimes relevant to the original FreeBSD port, so there’s benefits for everyone here.

What next?

Try it now if it has all the packages you need, or wait for a binary repository to be created to speed things up.  Remember, this is a new project, so a willingness to deal with problems and contribute to fixes is necessary.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DPorts, DragonFly, Goings-on, pkgsrc     17 Comments
01/10/2013

Can you read French? Then read this.


Stéphane Russell, on the users@ mailing list, pointed out an in-depth article about DragonFly’s 3.2 release, on linuxfr.org.  It’s in French, which means I’m just going to have to trust his word about the contents.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
01/08/2013

Virtio and virtio-block drivers added


Venkatesh Srinivas and Tim Bisson have been working for some time on a port of FreeBSD’s virtio and virtio-block drivers.  (see man page commit)  They’ve now been committed.  This should make your virtual disk perform better, if nothing else.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly, FreeBSD     0 Comments
01/07/2013

More on the Himeno Phoronix benchmark, and memory allocation


If you recall, Phoronix recently ran a bunch of benchmarks on DragonFly.  One spot that didn’t look good was the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver”.  I’m no closer to knowing what capability it actually tests other than itself, but Alex Hornung, Matt Dillon, and Venkatesh Srinivas figured out that cache coloring was the missing ingredient.  DragonFly now scores the same as Linux.

Tangentially related, this cache coloring is happening in nmalloc, which is now used on 64-bit DragonFly systems.  The previous one, dmalloc, had problems in long-running programs.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
01/05/2013

DPorts and what it’s about


John Marino has been working for some time on a project he calls, ‘DPorts’.  You may have noticed his recent commits for it.  He wrote up a summary on users@ to explain what he’s doing.  It’s translating FreeBSD ports to DragonFly in a way that appears to be (relatively) low-maintenance.   It only works on DragonFly 3.3 and up and you can’t use it at the same time as pkgsrc.

Most interesting to me, it gets rid of the quarterly release chase that happens with pkgsrc releases.  Since it’s primarily a binary install system, packages are only upgraded when the results are known to work.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, pkgsrc     1 Comment
01/04/2013

Project ideas again


Ishan Thilina asked for some project ideas, and Samuel Greear gave a list of links that may be useful for anyone looking for a project of their own.  I offered strategy.  It didn’t work out, but this information’s still useful.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
01/02/2013

AVX support added to DragonFly


Adam Sakareassen submitted a patch for AVX support for 64-bit DragonFly, and Alex Hornung has committed it.  If you’re like me and have only the vaguest idea what AVX is, it’s a set of processor instructions added by Intel to Sandy Bridge and later CPUs.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     1 Comment
12/29/2012

Brief conversation about disk encryption


There’s a short thread running on the DragonFly users@ list about disk encryption; there’s some descriptions of encryption work there for the curious.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     2 Comments
12/27/2012

IFQ packet staging mechanism added


I’m not sure what IFQ stands for, but Sepherosa Ziehau’s added it.  It appears to be based on an idea from Luigi Rizzo called ‘netmap‘.  In this case, network packets are grouped together before being placed onto the network interface’s hardware queue.  That means better packet per second performance without a corresponding increase in CPU usage, as Sepherosa Ziehau’s report lists, along with needed sysctls.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, Device support, DragonFly     3 Comments
12/19/2012

Linux and cpdup, plus a note


I could have sworn I noted it before, but as Venkatesh Srinivas points out, there’s a port of cpdup to Linux.  Also, if you’re using cpdup to copy material out of a Hammer volume’s history, use the -VV switch.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, Someday you will need this     0 Comments
12/17/2012

DragonFly 3.2.2 released


DragonFly 3.2.2 has been tagged.  The tag commit has a list of the fixes; this is a bugfix release, but it’s a good one.   Download an ISO (they should be at the mirrors by now) or update your system.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     1 Comment

IP Forwarding Performance


Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot of commits to increase packet-per-second rates without increasing CPU usage.  He’s published a sort of progress report/benchmark to show current performance levels.  It sounds like he’s expecting even better performance in the future, though I’m not sure how much more he could push out of it, since the bulk performance appears to be close to the rated capacity of the copper…

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     1 Comment
12/14/2012

3.2.2 coming up


There’s been a large number of fixes and improvements to DragonFly 3.2 lately, so I’m planning to roll DragonFly 3.2.2 this weekend so there’s an image with them all.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
12/13/2012

Using gcc 4.7 and pkgsrc


If you were thinking you wanted to try gcc 4.7 with pkgsrc, John Marino’s described the option you need to set.  It only works in pkgsrc-master  right now (because of changes John made), and not every package in pkgsrc will build.

The advantage is that it’s also possible, with the same syntax, to set pkgsrc to build with gcc 4.4.  This means the default compiler in DragonFly can be changed to gcc 4.7 and pkgsrc packages that aren’t compatible can still be built.

Update: Check this minor change: ‘?=’ instead of ‘=’.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments
12/12/2012

3.3 users, please do a full buildworld/buildkernel


If you’re running DragonFly 3.3, make sure you perform a full buildworld and buildkernel when you next upgrade.  Sascha Wildner is mentioning this as a cautionary note after experiencing issues when using quickkernel, after removing a number of syscalls.  Once past that point, it should be safe to go back to quickworld/quickkernel.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Heads Up!     0 Comments
12/11/2012

HAMMER2 update


Matthew Dillon has written up another update on his progress with HAMMER2.  (I need to be consistent in how I write that.)  He has disks being exported and mounted on other systems, and adds an explanation of some of the issues around creating reliable multi-master setups.  Before you get too excited, no, multi-master isn’t working yet, and this is not production ready.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, Hammer     0 Comments

Another set of benchmarks


There’s more benchmarks for DragonFly vs. other systems on Phoronix.  It has the same problem as previous benchmarks; some of the benchmarks may have no connection to reality (what does the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver” actually test?), and almost every system has a different version of the gcc compiler.  So it’s meaningless in terms of comparative or absolute performance.  On the other hand, DragonFly doesn’t do badly.

You can also look at the comments to see someone absolutely freak out over the very existence of things that aren’t Linux.  I’m not sure if it’s actually trolling, since the comments are so exactly wrong.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     4 Comments
12/10/2012

machdep.pmap_mmu_optimize turned off


Matthew Dillon turned off the machdep.pmap_mmu_optimize sysctl by default, since wider testing has found some bugs.  It’s only on by default on DragonFly 3.3 systems, so there’s nothing to do if you’re on 3.2-release.  The feature will come back after some bugfixing.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

Slightly less memory usage


There’s been a few changes to reduce memory usage; this may not affect you unless you have an extremely busy machine, but it won’t hurt.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
12/08/2012

ISO639 update, of all things


I knew about files like /etc/services, for common IP port usages, and /usr/share/zoneinfo, for time zones, but I didn’t know that DragonFly (along with other systems) keeps a list of agreed names for various human languages defined by ISO639 in /share/misc/iso639, and it’s maintained at least in part by the Library of Congress.  At least I didn’t know until Sascha Wildner updated it.

Updated: Birthstones and flowers.  Don’t know why.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
12/04/2012

Still using ISA cards? A few more drivers removed


The stl(4), bt(4), aic(4), and cy(4) drivers are now PCI-only, which means no COMPAT_OLDISA kernel option, and a time to upgrade your hardware if you’re actually using these devices.  Does anyone even still have ISA slots?

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     3 Comments
12/03/2012

pkgsrc-current and gcc 4.7.2


If you’ve ever wondered how building all of pkgsrc would go with GCC 4.7.2, which is in DragonFly but not the default compiler, John Marino can show you just that.  He has a list of the results from a bulk build of all packages on DragonFly with GCC 4.7.2.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, pkgsrc     0 Comments

More Hammer2 work


Matthew Dillon’s committed a bunch more Hammer2 work.  No, it’s not usable yet.  Look at the commit messages for details on how he’s setting up multi-master volume information, though.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Hammer     0 Comments
11/27/2012

Crypto card possibilities


This discussion of cryptographic hardware for FreeBSD may include hardware that would work for DragonFly too.  Can someone verify?

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, FreeBSD, Someday you will need this     1 Comment
11/25/2012

NDIS and USB4BSD test


Do you use ndis(4) for a network card that would otherwise not work?  Are you running DragonFly 3.3?  Are you willing to run USB4BSD and see if it works?  If you do, tell Sascha Wildner if his changes worked.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
11/22/2012

Two very specific tools, upgraded


If you are one of the few people still wanting to read an OS/2 HPFS drive, support for it in DragonFly has been updated by Antonio Huete Jimenez.  It’s read-only, but writing didn’t work well, and I’d be surprised if there’s any hpfs disks that aren’t archival, out there.

Also, Sepherosa Ziehau has updated the pktgen program to generate even more packets, even at relatively low CPU clock speeds.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     4 Comments
11/21/2012

More HighPoint support


Sascha Wildner recently brought in support from FreeBSD for HighPoint’s RocketRAID 4520 and 4522 SAS/SATA RAID cards.  It’s in the hptiop(4) driver.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly, FreeBSD     0 Comments
11/20/2012

Faster initial pkgsrc downloads


The initial download of pkgsrc via Git on DragonFly is a little bit faster now, with the ‘make pkgsrc-create-shallow’ option recently added by John Marino.  Note that there’s a similar option for src.  It skips downloading file history.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, pkgsrc     0 Comments
11/19/2012

SMBIOS access now possible


Sascha Wildner has added system management BIOS (SMBIOS) support, visible with kenv, from FreeBSD.  Use it for getting things like the BIOS revision, system manufacturer, and so on.  For example:

smbios.bios.reldate="12/04/2006"
smbios.bios.vendor="Dell Inc. "
smbios.bios.version="2.1.0 "

This may seem minor, but this can be very helpful when dealing with hardware you aren’t physically able to access.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly, FreeBSD, Someday you will need this     0 Comments
11/17/2012

More benchmarking on Phoronix


Because of the recent good results for pgbench on DragonFly 3.2, Phoronix has a new benchmark of DragonFly using other (possibly unrelated) tests.  There’s not a lot of information to glean from them; they are testing operations different than what was optimized for pgbench in 3.2.  I’d like to see DragonFly 3.0 tested the same way to see how much improvement there was between versions.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     2 Comments
11/13/2012

DragonFly in your iPhone


While we’re talking about cross-pollination of BSDs: going by licenses, there’s some DragonFly code in the iPhone – at least the fairq scheduler.  (Noted by several people on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: BSD, DragonFly     0 Comments
11/12/2012

New version of MaheshaDragonFlyBSD


MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a ‘liveUSB’ distribution of DragonFly with software preinstalled, has been updated to run using DragonFly 3.2.1 as a base.  The linked page contains screenshots and a description of what comes out-of-the-box.  (mentioned previously here.)

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
11/08/2012

MSI-X for the masses


Sepherosa Ziehau is switching a number of network cards over to use ifpoll, which means they will have capabilities similar to MSI-X, even if the network card doesn’t support it.  My suspicion is that it will make these cards perform better in busy situation where they would otherwise get bogged down… but that’s based on hunch rather than empirical testing.  As Sepherosa Ziehau pointed out, it certainly can’t hurt.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Device support, DragonFly     0 Comments
11/05/2012

Binary package removal for DragonFly 2.11 and below


On the 10th of November, I’m going to remove the binary pkgsrc packages from mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org for DragonFly 2.8 through 2.11.  They are closing in on 2 years old at this point, and are from a pkgsrc branch that hasn’t been updated for that long.

If you are actually using version of DragonFly that old, you can continue building from pkgsrc normally; these are just prebuilt packages.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Heads Up!, pkgsrc     0 Comments
11/03/2012

Chaos Communication Congress and DragonFly


Every year, the Chaos Communication Congress tends to gather at least a few DragonFly-using people, and this year is no different.  The event is being held in a much larger arena this year, in Hamburg, Germany, so there’s a good chance a DragonFly ‘assembly‘ could be held.  Speak up on the users@ mailing list, or EFNet #dragonflybsd, if you’re going too.  It’s happening on the last few days of this year, December 27th through 31st.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Conventions, DragonFly     0 Comments
11/02/2012

DragonFly 3.2.1 is released!


I’ve written a release email that includes the steps for updating from source and updating pkgsrc for existing installs.  This release enjoys better performance and new packages, so go, enjoy.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Heads Up!     18 Comments
10/31/2012

Another full world/kernel build for the bleeding edge


There was one more file to change for the bmake import, so if you are running DragonFly 3.3 and updated between the 28th and 30th of October, do a full rebuild.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     1 Comment

OpenSSH updated


Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSH in DragonFly to 6.1p1.  This looks to be a bugfix release, but check the changelog for details.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments

If we only had the spiffy name…


I mentioned this before in the Lazy Reading from last Sunday, but it’s worth a second look: Apple’s new Fusion Drive product appears to be very much like DragonFly’s swapcache.  DragonFly doesn’t have exclusive right to the idea of caching on a faster disk, clearly, so I’m not complaining that it’s “ours”.  It’s frustrating to see product announcement/press releases stumbling all over this like it’s a new thing.

Then again, having new ideas about technology ideas and making sure they spread is one of the points of the BSD license, so perhaps there’s no good reason to complain at all.

(Before anyone reads too much into this: No, I don’t know of any direct relationship between swapcache and Fusion Drive; they may have no common background other than structure.)

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     6 Comments
10/29/2012

bmake arrives


John Marino’s committed bmake as the replacement to make, as mentioned previously.  You should probably do a full buildworld/kernel sequence.  This of course only affects you if you are on DragonFly 3.3.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
10/27/2012

More Hammer 2 in the tree


Matthew Dillon’s put more of his Hammer work into DragonFly, with notable parts being the creation of a ‘dmsg’ setup for advertising available block devices to share between machines using Hammer.  To anticipate your next question: No, it’s not something you can run right now as a test; this is the underlying framework.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Hammer     0 Comments
10/26/2012

Goodbye gcc 4.1


John Marino has removed gcc 4.1 from DragonFly.  It was detached from the build process in 3.2, but now it’s out of there entirely.  I think this affects nothing at this point other than the size of /src.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
10/25/2012

SMP all the time now


The kernel in DragonFly is now SMP by default.  The “SMP” option in the kernel config is no longer needed, so it’s been turned into a no-op.  You don’t have to update your custom kernel config… yet.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly     0 Comments
10/23/2012

3.2 release still on the way


The pkgsrc packages for DragonFly 3.2 are still building…  I’ve tagged the release, so it will be ready as soon as the packages are ready.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Heads Up!     0 Comments

Writing a scheduler and where to start


Sandip Jadhav asked if anyone was working on an I/O scheduler.  Chris Turner replied with a “no”, but also with a list of places to look for details on writing one, which I’m linking here for posterity.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on     0 Comments
10/22/2012

From make to bmake


John Marino is working on a very good idea: bringing bmake into DragonFly as a replacement for the current ‘make’.  bmake is going through more active development and apparently also in use/will be used? on FreeBSD, so syncing up with the same make flavor as FreeBSD and NetBSD will help everyone.  It’ll also remove the problem where you ‘make’ everything in DragonFly, except pkgsrc packages which you ‘bmake’.  It’s not changed over yet.

(What does OpenBSD use for make?)

 

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, FreeBSD, Goings-on, NetBSD     8 Comments
10/20/2012

OpenMPI, OpenMP on DragonFly


A conversation about compilers in the DragonFly base system led peeter (must) to describe his group’s use of OpenMPI on DragonFly for physics calculations.  Apparently he’s had a significant performance improvement on DragonFly.

Along similar lines, John Marino helped out by bringing in libssp and libgomp for gcc 4.7 for use with OpenMP.  (This is in DragonFly 3.3, not 3.2).

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: Committed Code, DragonFly, Goings-on     3 Comments
10/13/2012

gcc 4.7.2 and pkgsrc, a test


John Marino did a bulk build of pkgsrc using gcc 4.7.2, and posted the results.  The result?  About 1% of packages that built with gcc 4.4 did not build with 4.7.2.  Whether that’s a problem with gcc or a problem with how each of those software packages were created by the original authors, I don’t know.

Posted by Justin Sherrill     Categories: DragonFly, Goings-on, pkgsrc     0 Comments