If you are using an Intel 10G Ethernet card with a 82598GB chipset, you’re using ixgbe(4). You may want to set the net.inet.tcp.sosend_agglim sysctl to a value over 12 in certain circumstances, as described by Francois Tigeot.
Category: DragonFly
Some new Hammer features: scoreboards, shells
These are small, but they make life easier: Hammer now has a scoreboard file, for viewing of mirror-streams running in the background. There’s also a ssh-remote directive, so you can use ssh without enabling an interactive shell, and a HAMMER_RSH environment variable so different remote shells can be used. These are all for Hammer 1.
09/11/2012
A lot of scheduler talk
If you ever wanted to read an extensive discussion about the scheduler, today’s your day. Mihai Carabas, who posted the details of a long discussion he had with Matthew Dillon about how the scheduler works. You may recall Mihai’s name from the very successful GSoC scheduler project that recently finished.
(look, a link to the new Mailman archive!)
09/10/2012
Mailman conversion for DragonFly mailing lists complete
All the mailing lists at @dragonflybsd.org have been converted over to Mailman. The old archives are still functioning, and will continue to update until I can find enough old material to retroactively complete the Mailman archives.
09/08/2012
Mailman conversion for dragonflybsd.org mailing lists
If you’re on any of the dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, I’m converting them over from bestserv to Mailman. I’ve done bugs@, commits@, hammer@, and test@ so far, and I’ll move the old archives over to the same format as soon as I find an actual mbox file with the old messages in it. The remaining lists should be tomorrow.
(If you got a note tonight from a list you were sure you were unsubscribed from, that was my fault; sorry! I didn’t understand the format of the bestserv user lists.)
A whole bunch of installation notes
DragonFly user varialus has created a page on the DragonFly website (it’s a wiki, after all) with all the notes taken from trying installation, etc. There’s far more notes than I expected there, so it’s worth a read.
09/07/2012
Porting drivers, for future reference
Much of this new document has been around in other forms for a while, but now, there’s a brief guide on porting drivers to DragonFly in the source tree.
08/30/2012
Do you have a SSD yet?
Because here’s some recommendations on good models, and here’s a way to check SSD health. Seriously, they’re great.
08/29/2012
3.0.3 images up
I’ve uploaded DragonFly 3.0.3 disk images, both ISO and IMG. They should start appearing on a mirror site near you in the next 24 hours. This took a while after the tagging, I know, but I wanted to make sure every one of them booted. I didn’t on a previous release, and regretted it.
08/28/2012
LSI users, take note
If you have a LSI RAID card, meaning you are using the mfi(4) driver, Sascha Wildner has added /proc/devices to linprocfs, so that LSI’s MegaCLI configuration utility will run.
Is your battery smart?
Sascha Wildner has pushed smart battery support, based on a patch from Dmitry Komissaroff and FreeBSD. He asks people to try it out. It apparently provides for more accurate battery charge level readings?
08/27/2012
Postgres benchmarking again
Francois Tigeot benchmarked several different operating systems using Postgres 9.2b3, including DragonFly, and published the results. I have a local copy of the PDF since the attachment didn’t really survive the archiving. Follow the thread for discussion. The Linux results look abnormally high, so it is possible that something different is happening on that platform…
08/25/2012
Any mbox files for @dragonflybsd.org lists?
Do you happen to have the saved messages for one or more @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists sitting around? Hopefully in mbox format? I’m working on getting Mailman installed to replace bestserv, and being able to bring in the old messages would be nice.
08/23/2012
3.0.3 tagged
I’m working on building new images, but: DragonFly 3.0.3 has been tagged. If you’re running 3.0, you can update and get some of the recent bug fixes.
08/21/2012
Vendor support is always nice
I noticed that this recent commit from Sepherosa Ziehau is a bug fix for jme(4). The commit thanks a JMicron employee for help. It’s always appreciated when a vendor is helpful to an open-source project for hardware support. It’s also something you should consider the next time you are shopping for computer parts.
08/20/2012
dhclient update
Antonio Huete has updated dhclient(8) to match the OpenBSD version from whence it comes. I think all (most?) the BSDs use the OpenBSD dhcp client as a base now. The only user-facing change I see in a quick reading of the changes is a new ‘egress’ command line option.
08/18/2012
What to fix next for pkgsrc
John Marino has been on a tear fixing pkgsrc packages, and he posted a list of what he considers the most necessary packages to get working on DragonFly. Several people have already stepped up and fixed them if you follow the thread. If one of these packages is something you use, it’s worth looking at.
Tcl and fuse news
John Marino is working on updating tcl in pkgsrc. It’s apparently quite messy to update, which may be why it has sat out of date for some time. Never one to rest, he’s also been making FUSE filesystems work on DragonFly. (Here’s a FUSE explanation, if you need it.)
Also this. Someday I’m going to write a “games on DragonFly” feature, or series.
08/17/2012
Actually trying Hammer 2
If you wanted to try Hammer 2 and you have several DragonFly-current systems around (virtual or not), Matthew Dillon has the instructions. Keep in mind that this is not something ready for use; it can’t actually free up space, for instance. It’s neat that you can have multiple systems passing data back and forth already, though!
08/16/2012
More pkgsrc bulk
John Marino finished another bulk build of pkgsrc, and reports a 96.4% package success rate, using DragonFly and pkgsrc-current. We’re just a week or so from the next quarterly pkgsrc freeze, come to think of it…
Planning for the next release
3.2 is the next major release of DragonFly, which will be relatively soon by the every-6-months release schedule. John Marino’s put together another catch-all bug report for that release.
08/15/2012
Some more networking chipset updates
Francois Tigeot has updated the ixgbe(4) driver, and Sepherosa Ziehau has added TSO support for bce(4) and additional bge(4) related chips, mostly from the FreeBSD drivers.
Summer of Code, week something
I was on the road and missed last week’s summaries for Summer of Code, and we’re almost at the end of the session, so I’ll just link to the most recent items from Mihai Carabas (there’s a lot there!), Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Freitas.
08/14/2012
Two different pkgsrc reports
I recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc-2012Q2 on 64-bit DragonFly, though I still haven’t had a successfuly 32-bit build. However, John Marino has a report of how many packages are working on DragonFly in pkgsrc-current. (Answer: more than 95%)
Hammer 2 status report
Matthew Dillon recent posted a status report for Hammer 2. Of interest is the spanning tree protocol being built to handle messages between Hammer volumes. As he says in the message:
For example, we want to be able to have millions of diskless or cache-only clients be able to connect into a cluster and have it actually work…
(No, it doesn’t do this, yet.)
08/13/2012
alc(4) now works better, faster
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI support and cleaned up the alc(4) driver. If you’re using a network card with the Atheros AR8131 or AR8132 chipsets, you should see an improvement.
More RocketRAID support
Sascha Wildner has ported over more RocketRaid support, in the form of PCI IDs for various 4xxx and 3xxx series cards for hptiop(4), and a hpt27xx(4) driver that supports even more hardware.
08/04/2012
Hammer 2 messages
Hammer 2 (or is it HAMMER2?) is nowhere near ready to test. But! For laughs, I think it could be set up just so you can watch the messages go back and forth. Someone want to set up a few DragonFly-current VMs and try?
08/03/2012
Another SSD conversation
Pierre Abbat is curious about using Hammer on an SSD. The discussion that came from that has some useful points, including notes that a straightforward SSD as disk works for most anything with Hammer other than very intensive database use, due to the history retention. If space is an issue, swapcache on the SSD and attaching a normal HDD is a fine alternative. A SSD with Hammer can leave some features off, though I’d argue that dedup is totally worth is. Also, SSD speed is directly correlated with size.
More HighPoint RocketRAID support
Sascha Wildner’s added support (from FreeBSD) for the HighPoint RocketRAID 17xx, 22xx, 23xx and 25xx, via the hptrr(4) driver.
08/02/2012
Summer of Code Scheduler benchmarks
Mihai Carabas has posted some more results from an 8-core system showing his efforts to make the scheduler multi-threading aware. The results are generally a 5% speed gain, which I think matches previous benchmarks on machines with less processors.
08/01/2012
TCP Segmentation Offloading added
Sepherosa Ziehau’s added TSO support (that’s TCP Segmentation Offloading”, or “Large Segment Offload” going by Wikipedia) within IPv4 on DragonFly, pushing segmentation work from the CPU to the network card. There’s also some DragonFly-specific improvements.
There’s been a lot of commits from him lately focused around network card improvements; they haven’t been easily summarizable, but it’s worth watching if you are interested in high-bandwidth usage and the hardware to support it.
ciss(4) updates
The ciss(4) device, if you don’t know offhand, is for a variety of SCSI-3 adapters – mostly ones labeled “HP Smart Array”. Sascha Wildner has imported a large number of driver updates from FreeBSD.
07/25/2012
Another LiveDVD image
Sascha Wildner’s been working on his own DragonFly live images, in DVD or USB form. It uses XFCE along with a number of other packages listed in his post. They are .xz compressed, so they are nice and small for download, but make sure you have something that knows that format.
07/24/2012
A note for Atom CPU users
Not all flavors of Atom CPU support frequency scaling, as Sven Gaerner found out. This means more heat and more power usage. There’s further details scattered through the thread, but Sascha Wildner found what seems to be the definitive answer of which variants do and do not.
07/23/2012
A change for bc(1), no change for man
Pierre Abbat noticed that bc(1)‘s usage of GNU readline something that wasn’t GNU readline made it harder to use; Sascha Wildner changed it to use libedit. Pierre’s other complaint, that BSD man page output stays on-screen when completed, is a positive feature. Linux systems that clear man page output enrage me, because I expect to be able to take advantage of my scroll buffer.
MaheshaDragonFlyBSD now available
Juraj Sipos wrote me to describe MaheshaDragonFlyBSD, a live DragonFly image that has additional software preinstalled, and can easily be set to understand Sanskrit. It’s available in DVD and USB versions.
07/19/2012
Even more Broadcom
Thanks to David Christensen of Broadcom, Sepherosa Ziehau was able to add BCM5718 and BCM57785 support in the new bnx(4) driver.
07/17/2012
Pkgsrc success rate
John Marino sent a nice email to users@ about the improvements in build success for pkgsrc since May – and I can’t find it in the mailarchive. I’ll paste a summary after the break.
07/16/2012
Summer of Code and DragonFly, week 8
I hope it’s week 8. Anyway here’s the reports from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
07/13/2012
Google Summer of Code midterms: everyone passes
At least for DragonFly, every current participant in Google Summer of Code passed the midterm evaluation. Yay!
07/12/2012
Do you use TeX?
I don’t, but I know there are people that do. That’s why I’m pointing out this discussion where it appears that TeXLive 2012 won’t support NetBSD, which may mean no DragonFly either. There’s the not-yet-packaged alternative kertex. TeXLive is in pkgsrc, so I don’t know if that means the package will be discontinued or just altered.
(Please correct me where I go wrong here; I’m not very familiar with this, but it sounds like a drastic enough change that it should be mentioned.)
Update: as several people pointed out, it’s just prebuilt binary versions that aren’t being provided upstream. The packages will all still be present in pkgsrc. So, no functional change for most everyone.
Check your Samba version
… because versions 3.0 and 3.3 will be leaving pkgsrc soon-ish. You’d probably want to update anyway, but this is just in case you haven’t been upgrading too vigorously.
07/10/2012
gcc47 means gcc-aux for you
John Marino has added a ‘gcc47′ compiler ccvar, so you can build world and kernel with it. ’It’ is actually gcc-aux, since it seems to work better than the basic (“vanilla”?) gcc47. You also get Ada support, though that wasn’t the driving reason to pick it. This is brand new so don’t try it unless you’re ready to discover issues.
Is there any other BSD able to use gcc 4.7 for world/kernel? Even 4.6? Most of the attention has been on clang.
07/09/2012
Summer of Code status, week 7
Here’s the regular status updates for Mihai Carabas (scheduler) and Vishesh Yadav (inotify). I don’t have the update from Ivan Sichmann Freitas yet. Here’s Ivan Sichmann Freitas.
07/07/2012
Here’s a way to donate
If you want to put something towards DragonFly, and you don’t have time or hardware, cash is now an option. (It’s not tax-deductible.)
07/06/2012
Netgraph 7 work still going on
Nuno Antunes is still working on that netgraph upgrade. Among other changes, ng_tty has been added. What’s it do? Something with ppp, I think.
07/04/2012
Visible capacitor failures
From a thread on users@, I bring you Visible Capacitor Failures. If the problems pictured are new to you… trust me, you will see them up close someday.
More than you may want to know about BIOSes and partitioning
Someone trying DragonFly couldn’t get it to start, and appeared to have a confused disk. It looks like the system BIOS were at fault, and Matt Dillon has an explanation of this minefield. (Including some comments on 4k physical disk sectors.)
07/03/2012
igb(4) and MSI-X
Sepherosa Ziehau has added MSI-X support to igb(4), the Intel PRO/1000 gigabit network card. What does that mean? The commit message mentions a default transmit rate of 1.48Mpps small packets, which is good?
GSoC updates, week 6
The usual weekly updates from Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. Mihai has some interesting bugs found this past week by running his code on Matt Dillon’s 48-core system.
06/30/2012
ixgbe(4) added
Francois Tigeot has added the Intel PRO/10GbE driver from FreeBSD, or ixgbe(4). A couple features are turned off, for now.
06/29/2012
Midterms coming up for GSoC
Attention students and mentors: the Summer of Code midterms open up on July 9th. This means students fill out an evaluation, and mentors also fill out an evaluation. Don’t forget, because completed evals from mentor and student both are necessary for a project to continue being funded.
More benchmarking
More benchmarks, in this case a comparison of Debian GNU/kFreeBSD and DragonFly. I’m not even sure how to derive meaning from it.
06/26/2012
Summer of Code status week 5
This is a report for last week’s work, so this is week 6 we are in now, and the reports are week 5′s status. So:
06/21/2012
Scheduler changes you can try yourself
If you have an Intel processor with multiple cores and hyperthreading support, you can compile a new kernel and try out Mihia Carabas’s GSoC work already; he’s created a test using the OpenSSL test case to time scheduling performance vs. number of threads.
06/20/2012
Scheduling and hyperthreading GSoC results so far
Mihai Carabas posted some benchmarks for his work with the DragonFly default scheduler and hyperthreaded CPUs. The end result, for those who don’t like number analysis, is that CPU-dependent speeds are reliably constant because tasks are being evenly scheduled across available CPUs.
(Well, CPU threads, since this is hyperthreading, but you get the idea.)
tmpfs now slightly faster
Based on a suggestion from Venkatesh Srinivas, tmpfs now uses a red-black tree for directory lookups, and is also now faster. Credit goes to Johannes Hofmann for doing the testing.
06/19/2012
More find(1) options
Sascha Wildner has synced find(1) with what’s in FreeBSD, which means there’s a lot more options available – see the commit for details. Many of them are for GNU compatibility, and I’m sure I’ll forget them all. I seem to have issues remembering how to use find(1) successfully.
06/18/2012
Summer of Code status reports week 4
I think it’s week four, at least.
Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas all have their weekly status reports up for Summer of Code. Unfortunately, Loganaden Velvindron received a great job offer out of the blue, so he no longer has time for Summer of Code. (He plans to continue involvement in DragonFly, however.)
06/16/2012
Other ways to use lint
Sascha Wildner has made it easier to use alternative syntax checking systems as a “lint” make target in DragonFly. His usage of coccinelle, as one of these alternatives, has already found many bugs – just today, for instance.
Is “alternative syntax checking systems” the right phrase for this? I don’t know. ”Correctness checker”? My phrases all sound like something you’d read on a government form.
06/12/2012
Summer of Code status reports, week 3
Here’s your most recent weekly round of DragonFly/Google Summer of Code updates:
- Ivan Sichmann Freitas: 32 bit api status
- Vishesh Yadav: inotify and fs indexing service status
- Mihai Carabas: Add SMT/HT awareness to DragonFlyBSD scheduler
- Loganaden Velvindron: Privilege separation
06/09/2012
HAMMER2 and remote mounting
Reading this HAMMER2 commit carefully shows some future plans: remote cluster control, and the ability to mount nonlocal HAMMER2 volumes. A reminder: those are future plans, not what you can do now.
06/08/2012
doscmd(1) dies a dramatic death.
The i386-only doscmd(1) is gone from DragonFly. I don’t think I ever used it, as other emulators/systems are so prevalent and complete.
06/05/2012
CCMS goes away, comes back
The cache coherency management code in DragonFly has been removed, but it’s coming back under HAMMER2, as part of how HAMMER2 maintains multiple master drives.
tmpfs and how fast it can go
Venkatesh Srinivas, currently on his colossal bike ride, introduced a different way of creating a tmpfs. This was test code, and Johannes Hofmann benchmarked it (see same page). It’s interesting cause there are numbers, and nice to see one person jumping in to test someone else’s results/idea.
06/04/2012
GSoC updates, week 2, plus a RFC
Week 2 Summer of Code status reports from Loganaden Velvindron, Mihai Carabas (plus followup), Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas are available. Ivan Sichmann Freitas also has a RFC on changes to DragonFly’s 32-bit API.
06/01/2012
How to upgrade pkgsrc packages
DragonFly has a page on updating pkgsrc, and so does NetBSD. I don’t think I linked to the latter before, but even if I didn’t, it’s still useful.
05/31/2012
New tool: netblast
Sepherosa Ziehau has added netblast, a tool originally from FreeBSD that, if I’m reading the commit right, flings packets of a given size at an IP/port of your choosing, for as long as you want.
crypt(3) and DES fix
It’s possible to accidentally truncate your password when using DES encryption and 0×80 in UTF-8 encoding. It’s fixed.
05/30/2012
Phoronix benchmarks revisited
There were some benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 some time ago on Phoronix. (You may recall it being mentioned here previously.) The disk numbers always seemed weird to me, so I repeated that part of the test, and here’s my writeup.
05/29/2012
SIOCGIFDATA renumbered, pflogd needs recompilation
Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes to SIOCGIFDATA, so if you are using DragonFly-master and pf, you will need a full rebuild. Also pftop, if you use it.
More Summer of Code status
Three more weekly status updates from DragonFly/GSoC students: Mihai Carabas, Vishesh Yadav, and Ivan Sichmann Freitas. That’s all for the past/first week.
05/25/2012
Summer of Code project updates
Loganaden Velvindron posted a terse update on the state of his Summer of Code work for DragonFly. I’m still waiting on the other students.
05/23/2012
Have i386 DragonFly? Want to try wine?
If you have a i386 DragonFly machine, emulators/wine-devel should now work.
Is anyone playing these games?
John Marino proposed cutting several game demos from pkgsrc. I don’t think they are playable at this point, even if you have the missing source files.
