DragonFly BSD Digest » Goings-on

DragonFly and GRUB, together

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 23 May 2013 01:28:56 +0000

Rados?aw Szymczyszyn has manged to get support for DragonFly’s bootloader into GRUB. This is part of his Master’s project to make DragonFly multiboot capable, at least for i386.

(I love having new things show up from new people, out of the blue.)

Postgres still crazy fast on DragonFly

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 21 May 2013 23:43:06 +0000

Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.

Many upgrades, and Hammer

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 11 May 2013 01:28:13 +0000

John Marino managed to update GCC from 4.7.2 to 4.7.3 (4.7 changelog), zlib from 1.2.7 to 1.2.8 (changelog), and awk from 20110810 to 20121220 (can’t find a changelog).

In other update news, Matt Dillon has been working on HAMMER2′s flush sequencing.

Update: tcsh too.

DragonFly and Bittorrent

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 May 2013 17:03:42 +0000

I’ve put the 3.4 release images up on terasaur, a Bittorrent seeding site. Please try pulling them and let me know how it goes. I haven’t torrented many things, so I am unsure how to even verbify “torrent’. Hopefully that sentence and those links work out.

Kimsufi servers, DragonFly, and French

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 03 May 2013 13:43:03 +0000

If you’re looking to install DragonFly on a Kimsufi server, and you can read French, this explanation may help you. (via Enjolras on EFNet #dragonflybsd)

More about the DragonFly boot process

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 02 May 2013 01:54:12 +0000

Have you ever wondered about how the booting process works on DragonFly? Well, Ivan Uemlianin did, out loud. Several different recommendations followed, so now you can learn too.

Howto: dports and xfce4

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 01 May 2013 02:35:34 +0000

‘william opensource4you’ posted a summary of the steps he took for setting up a DragonFly system with XFCE4, using dports. It’s pretty straightforward, and thanks to dport’s binary nature, should be exactly reproducible.

DragonFly 3.4 release very soon

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:22:09 +0000

As I described in a post to the kernel@ mailing list, the DragonFly 3.4 images are getting uploaded for mirroring and downloaded for testing. Assuming no surprises happen, we will be able to release very soon.

The 3.4 improvements, quantified

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 27 Apr 2013 02:14:27 +0000

Francois Tigeot put together some examples of the improvements from DragonFly 3.2 to DragonFly 3.4. The improvement in tmpfs performance is pretty dramatic.

Hey, mirror operators!

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 21 Apr 2013 13:32:50 +0000

If you administer one of the DragonFly mirrors, there’s a new /dports directory that can be mirrored. See that second link for details.

dports and gcc versions; an explanation

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:22:04 +0000

John Marino has a concise explanation of why dports mostly uses gcc 4.4 still to compile, even if you’re building DragonFly itself with the default 4.7. It’s a reason to not use NO_GCC44 – yet.

entr(1); Run arbitrary commands when files change.

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 19 Apr 2013 02:18:28 +0000

Eric Radman sent along a plug for a utility he is working on called entr(1). The desciption is “Run arbitrary commands when files change.” The site for it has several nifty examples – run make when *.c files change, or convert Markdown files to HTML as soon as they are modified. The really nice thing about it is that it’s perfectly BSD-friendly, and uses kqueue, but will also work on Linux. This beats the “This runs on the one flavor of Linux I use, in one particular shell!” approach I’ve seen from some other developers. See the reddit discussion of it for comparisons to inotify. ~~No, it’s not in pkgsrc/ports yet.~~

Update: And thanks to Thomas Klausner, it’s in pkgsrc as sysutils/entr, and in ports as sysutils/entr thanks to Eitan Adler. You have no reason not to try it now.

International Space Apps Challenge this weekend

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 16 Apr 2013 02:19:06 +0000

NASA’s International Space Apps Challenge is this weekend, 4/20/2013. Fancy as it sounds, it’s really a single-day hackathon around open software and hardware, with the problems to fix coming from NASA and therefore probably very unique. It’s happening in a bunch of places around the world, but there’s one right here in my town.

Running a spam blacklist

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 15 Apr 2013 21:12:12 +0000

Peter Hansteen has an extensive writeup of how he has managed the bsdly.net spam blacklists. Normally I’d stick this article in the Lazy Reading links, but the article is good enough to call out separately. It’s excellent not just for the mechanical aspects of how the blacklists were maintained, but for his strict description on how the process is simple, verifiable, and transparent. That last item, transparency, is how many anti-spam groups fall down.

DragonFly 3.4 release status

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 14 Apr 2013 00:42:15 +0000

Here’s a status report on the 3.4 release, pulled right from my mailing list post:

We have the ability to use pkgsrc or dports (building from source in either case) now
Several people have committed the remaining last-minute fixes
I’m not going to have pkgsrc binaries built for the release.
dports binaries – John Marino and Francois Tigeot are uploading now.

I’d like to have the release available with binary packages for dports immediately, because I anticipate a number of people wanting to try it out. So, the release will be delayed a few days while the packages upload.

A BSD auction

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 10 Apr 2013 01:38:37 +0000

The very first copy of Absolute OpenBSD (2nd edition), signed by Michael W. Lucas, is being auctioned off in a charity event for OpenBSD. There’s 5 days left to bid, though the price is already somewhere north of $2 per page.

Summer of Code links for everyone

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 09 Apr 2013 01:33:35 +0000

The DragonFly page on the Summer of Code site is set up. If you are a potential mentor that I’ve talked to before, I’ve already sent you an email with details. If you are a potential mentor I haven’t talked to, you can email me or send a request via the DragonFly page. (Google has a new ‘connections’ method for signup this year.)

If you’re an interested student, take a look at the DragonFly Projects Page. Keep in mind that your proposal does not have to be one of those ideas – new projects are always welcome, and often have the advantage of being unique instead of being one of several similar proposals. (hint, hint)

bxr.su announced

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 11:18:32 +0000

Constantine Aleksandrovich Murenin has put together a new site, bxr.su. His announcement to users@ goes into a lot of detail, but here’s a preview: it’s an OpenGrok site that has a forked version of OpenGrok that’s both speedy and takes BSD into account, along with other nice features.

Here’s the catch: it’s currently IPv6 only. IPv4 will be on as a test just today, and on for good shortly after. Read that announcement I mentioned for details.

Testing out the DragonFly 3.4 release candidate

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 23:49:43 +0000

If you have a DragonFly 3.2 system and you want to try the 3.4 release candidate, you can delete your local source, edit the Makefile to pull down 3.4 instead of 3.2, and run it.

cd /usr

rm -rf src

vi /usr/Makefile;

(in vi) :%s/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_2/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_4/g

(save, quit vi)

make src-create-shallow

… then proceed to make buildworld and so on, as normal.

The caveats: I haven’t tested this yet, and this assumes you don’t have any local changes in /usr/src that you want to save. The usual warnings about lighting your computer on fire, etc., apply.

pkgsrc-2013Q1 available via DragonFly git

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 03 Apr 2013 01:33:31 +0000

The DragonFly Git repository of pkgsrc now has the 2013Q1 branch. You can switch to it by editing your /usr/Makefile (look for existing references to either pkgsrc master or pkgsrc-2012Q3) and using the normal commands.