Archive for the Heads Up! Category
We’ve got a third year in Summer of Code!
The timeline shows about a week and a half for planning, and then student applications begin on the 29th of March, and run to April 9th.
If you want to participate as a student, start planning now by talking with people on IRC (#dragonflybsd on EFNet) or on the mailing lists. You cannot be over-prepared.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s host for DragonFly, chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de, is down for good. Since it had excellent bandwidth, it was frequently used as the source for a lot of the DragonFly mirror sites out there.
If you were using it for your own mirror, switch to mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, and tell Matthew Dillon at @dragonflybsd.org your contact info so you can be notified of changes. (If you’re not mirroring, please download from the nearest site that is.)
The next release, 2.6, is scheduled for mid-March. Please make sure things are running well, as there’s a lot of new features already ready for this release.
Most of the dragonflybsd.org machines will be down for a short period Wednesday; this is for an upgrade that includes an SSD for the recent swapcache work. Everyone should notice a speedup, since while crater.dragonflybsd.org is getting the SSD/swapcache, a lot of crater’s directories are mounted on other machines via NFS.
Matthew Dillon is setting up DragonFly to be able to use a fast disk (like a SSD) for disk cache, reducing the effect swap has on speed. This means very large amounts of data could be read into memory – greater than the available RAM in the system – without having the normal paging out problems that happen when memory is exhausted. It’ll work for any filesystem on the machine – HAMMER, UFS, or NFS. His inital notes have more. Other notes include details on the NFS benefits, and possibilities with SSDs. Wear-leveling may make SSDs last much longer.
Work has started, and there’s an update (with examples) that people can try, though it may destroy all your data at this point. Test results in that update show, if I’m reading it right, a better than doubling of speed on a repeated md5 test on a large file when using the new caching system. This should be a huge benefit.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5 and updated in the past week or so, and have UFS disks, there’s some instability introduced by Matthew Dillon’s recent work. It ought to be better by next week.
Users of Hammer, or of UFS only as /boot, don’t have anything to worry about.
Thomas Nikolajsen experienced firsthand a bug where downgrading a Hammer PFS master to a slave and then later making it a master again lost all data. Lucky him… The problem’s now fixed.
This has been bouncing around other news outlets, but I’ll mention it here: There’s an out of data SpamAssassin rule that can potentially mark mail as spam because of the 2010 date. A mail to tech-pkg@netbsd.org describes the various fixes.
The step of ’sa-update && /etc/rc.d/spamd restart’ seems to have fixed it for me. Incidentally, if you are using SpamAssassin, sa-update is a good tool to run on a regular basis.
Matthew Dillon is working on moving more of DragonFly out from under the Giant Lock. This may mean some instability this week if you’re following the bleeding-edge. He’s already posted a warning and an explanation (with numbers!) of work already completed.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5, Matthew Dillon has changed thread and process structures, meaning that a full rebuild of kernel and modules is necessary on the next system update.
SSH, on DragonFly, now defaults to allowing root logins, but does not allow plaintext password logins. This is on new installs only, so any existing installations won’t be affected, even after upgrades. Plaintext passwords are under constant brute-force attack for some years now, so this is probably safer.
dragonflybsd.org will be going down for work somewhere in the next two weeks. The package archive at avalon.dragonflybsd.org is located elsewhere, so pkg_radd and similar programs will still work.
DragonFly 2.4.1 has been released; this is recommended for any users of 2.4.0, as there’s a lot of little bugfixes. (Check the tag list to see all the fixes.) Next time, we may make a release candidate first.
DragonFly 2.4.1 is slated for release this Wednesday, 2009-09-30. This will have fixes for the installer and 64-bit DragonFly, among other things.
WARNS_WERROR has been turned on, for i386 and for amd64 builds. This means that warnings will halt a build just like an error. This should mean that the number of warnings from DragonFly source (already lower because of Sasha Wildner’s efforts, among others) should only decrease from now on.
The 2.4 release of DragonFly is out. This is a major release, with a lot of new features packed in, so read the release notes carefully. There’s a 64-bit experimental version, too
By the way, please use a mirror. Avalon is a good one, as is chlamydia.
Updating steps I used after the cut.
The 2.4 release looks to be about a week and a half away; if you’re a committer, please plan to make drastic changes after the release, if possible,
The libtiff package has been found to write out incorrect TIFF files in version 3.9.0. If that’s what is installed on your system, please update now.