This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too.  This only applies if you’re running DragonFly 3.1, of course.

I got the old mailing list archives converted to Mailman.  As I wrote in a post to users@, please let me know about problems.  There’s some garbled messages from the old archive that were placed into the 2012-Sept. section for each message; I’ll be cleaning those up manually.

The old mailing list software for @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, bestserv, apparently allowed people not subscribed to a list to post to it, after answering a confirmation message for each message posted.

The closest way to duplicate that for Mailman is to sign up for the list you want, and then turn off mail delivery for your email address in the config page for that mailing list.  This won’t affect a lot of people, since most people want list output in their mailbox, but there’s at least a few I’ve fixed that way.

Probably not for a few weeks, at least.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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…

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.

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.

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.

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.

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.)

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.

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.

TUI mode is available now for kgdb on DragonFly, thanks to John Marino.  It’s apparently a Text User Interface for debugging core files.  I haven’t used it, so I’m relying on the testimony of others.

Matthew Dillon posted a followup on that fix for clustering I noted yesterday.  It describes the exact problems better than I could, though the result is the same: you should update if you’re running bleeding-edge DragonFly.

A fix for cluster_write() issues reported by multiple people is now available, so if you’re running a version of DragonFly newer than 3.0.2, you’ll want to update.

Welcome our newest committer: Markus Pfeiffer.  He’s ‘profmakx’ on EFNet #dragonfly, and has been working on a port of FreeBSD’s USB infrastructure – which I am looking forward to, tremendously.

Mosh, mentioned on this Digest a few weeks back, is now installed on leaf.dragonflybsd.org.  If you’re doing any development work there but dealing with a relatively high latency, this should help.  (Thanks Venkatesh Srinivas.)

DragonFly now has its own ntp.org zone.  What’s this mean?  Nothing material, but it’s nice to do.

That DragonFly review is now available in all six parts.  (I included the preamble there.)  I still haven’t made it through the whole thing.

Steven Rosenberg is writing the longest DragonFly review ever.  Here’s parts one, two, and three.  There’s 3 more parts to come, 1 per day, so check back for the end of the story.

I’ve been working on a small house project over the past few days.  My house has a basement workroom, which I use for whatever I need to do involving pliers or a saw.  I’ve been slowly outfitting it over the past few years, and one thing I wanted to do was to wire it for music.

Not just a radio, but a computer that I could play sound file from, and stream audio.  You can buy hardware for just that, but I’m cheap.  I also wanted to keep it from looking like a computer desk; I have enough of that in my life already.  This is a minor project; nothing like what you’d find on Instructables, but entertaining because it let me use DragonFly.

I purchased a set of cheap speakers from Newegg.  You’ll notice that the speakers have a metal frame that forms a loop at the bottom – that’s important later.  I bought the speakers and hooked to a tiny netbook, running DragonFly 3.0.2.  It works fine for playing music, though the case speaker doesn’t shut off when external ones are attached.  That’s not a problem here, though, since it’s not loud enough to be audible over the separate speaker output.

Those metal loops on the bottoms of the speakers turned out to be handy.  I found some scrap wood, and built a small armature to fit inside the loop and hold it offset from the ceiling joist.  Both of these wooden blocks could have the speaker slide over it, upside down.

I stained both of the blocks so that they wouldn’t stand out against the dark wood of the workroom ceiling.

I affixed the wooden hangers as far out as the cord on the speakers would let me,  and slid the upside-down speakers onto them.  There’s enough length in the cords to place the separate volume control dial on the workbench, and I’m done.

You can see the ceiling speaker in the upper corner.  How’s the sound?  Okayish.  You aren’t going to get much out of a set of speakers this cheap, but at least I don’t have wires over my work area, and I don’t have to worry about puncturing a speaker with a screwdriver by accident, or something similar.  I can close the laptop to keep it at least somewhat protected.

This is not a terribly complex project, but it makes me happy to have a DragonFly-based jukebox when I’m home.  (This laptop usually travels with me.)  I’m playing the music with mpg123, which is a surprisingly capable command-line player for files and for streaming audio.

(Yes, that is a large black velvet painting of a bullfight in the background.  It was a wedding present.  I also have black velvet paintings of Kenny Rogers as the Gambler, Fat Elvis, and Jesus blessing a tractor-trailer.  I don’t know why.)

John Marino has changed the default search path for ldconfig; it no longer looks along /usr/lib/gcc* since that’s already included via rpath.  The end result: you will need to do ‘make upgrade’ after your next buildworld build/installworld.

A torrent for DragonFly 3.0.2, found via Google search.  Which ISO or img files does it include?  I don’t know.  Which architectures?  I don’t know.  Is it legit?  I don’t know.  Click at your own risk, just like any other link.

DragonFly 3.0.2 is out, and you can update (see /usr/src/UPDATING) an existing install or download a new one.  This release turns off I/O APIC when booting in a VM because it caused issues for some users.

Matthew Dillon has posted a link to the errata for the AMD CPU bug that he found.   Venkatesh Srinivas has followed with a test case for the bug.

Matthew Dillon also pointed out there’s a workaround to fix it, with no performance impact, it’s only found on revision 10h CPUs (not Bulldozer), and it’s extremely hard to duplicate.  Why draw such a heavy line under that?  The news of this bug rippled out through various news sites and was almost universally misreported, in a way that made it look bad for AMD without actually realistically quantifying the problem.  Remember, it took 6 months just to find it – and he was looking for it!

John Marino’s updated DragonFly’s version of GCC 4.4 to 4.4.7, apparently the final version of GCC 4.4.  What’s next?  I imagine GCC 4.6 at some point.  It’s always a fun (maybe bikeshed-ish) conversation on which compiler to install, and which to have in base.

As several people have told me, there’s benchmarks of DragonFly 3.0 vs. 2.10, available on Phoronix.   CPU performance shows a significant improvement, in tests that actually test it.   (I’d think a file compression test would be disk-limited, for instance.)   Disk performance isn’t as great, but that may be in part because Hammer no longer will starve reading to benefit writing; that makes benchmarks look worse but improves real-world interactivity.  I’m sure there’s more quibbling to do, since it’s lies, damn lies benchmarks.

If for some reason you needed DragonFly 2.6 ISOs, or older, there’s a mirror.

If you want to build Firefox 10 out of pkgsrc, make sure your DragonFly system is up to date; there’s a recent fix needed to make that happen.

I tagged these when they happened in previous months, but I forgot to post them:

“peeter” got wip/jdk16 to build normally on DragonFly, and listed how to do it.  I don’t know if it still applies.

Sascha Wildner updated the isp(4) driver from FreeBSD, adding new supported chipsets and making it able to load as a module.

Also from Sascha Wildner, we’re now using one source only for PCI IDs.  Think of that next time you are looking at dmesg, and it makes sense.

If you’re in New York City or the UK, there’s two new DragonFly mirrors for your downloading pleasure.  Check the mirrors page for details.

Matthew Dillon’s CPU bug hunt has scattered its way across various news sites, some more accurate than others.  He’s posted a followup that is probably a more valuable read than any of the news reports.