January 2012
1 post
How much RAM is too little? →
If you’re running DragonFly on a very low-end system, you may be wondering about memory requirements for Hammer. Hammer is much less RAM-hungry than ZFS, so it looks like you can get away with…
December 2011
16 posts
OpenJDK 1.7 on DragonFly →
Chris Turner got it working on i386, at least, and his post will help you do the same. I don’t know if these changes have made it through to pkgsrc or for x86_64 yet.
Going to 28C3? →
Are you going to Chaos Communication Congress 28? There’s going to be a number of DragonFly developers there, so it’s a good time to meet up. They’re in EFNet #dragonflybsd IRC, so speak up there…
NFS fixes, too →
Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD…
Lazy Reading for 2011/12/18 →
The links are sheer entertainment this week. No strong options or anything, not even about that U.S. legislative mess called SOPA.
I greatly enjoyed this history of personal computer mishaps and…
Keeping binutils out of the build →
There is now a NO_BINUTILS221 option, added by Sascha Wildner, that will keep your system from building binutils 2.21 during a buildworld. The system will still build binutils 2.22, so there will…
pkgsrc-2011Q4 freeze started →
The freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q4 has started. No updates to pkgsrc, other than for security, for the next two weeks.
New DragonFly mirror →
There’s a new DragonFly mirror, in Colorado, USA – at dragonflybsd.mirrorcatalogs.com. It’s on the mirrors page on the DragonFly site, too.
Shopping shopping shopping! →
I do this almost every year, with a little bit more every time. Check those previous years for non-comics/books, cause that’s most of what I’ve seen lately. I’ve recently seen a number of…
Lazy Reading for 12/11/11 →
Last week was low on links, but this week is great! I hope you have some time set aside.
This article “The Strange Birth and Long Life of UNIX” has a picture of a PDP-11. I don’t know if I ever…
Coccinelle usage examples and DragonFly →
Sascha Wildner has been using a new-to-me tool called coccinelle (no, not that) to scan for a number of problems. Patches for this tool may be useful for anyone else using coccinelle…
BSDTalk 209: BSD Certification →
BSDTalk 209 is out, and it’s a 16-minute conversation with Jim Brown about BSD Certification. (who I think I met at NYCBSDCon 2010; a pleasant guy)
Moving files with a virtualized DragonFly →
If you’re running DragonFly in a virtual machine – specifically in VirtualBox, on Windows – there’s a recent thread on users@ that may have some tips, including a link from John Marino to …
Two pkgsrc work directory tips →
Two tips for working with pkgsrc, derived in part from this mailing list post on users@ (follow the thread) and from my own experience. If you put WRKOBJDIR=/usr/obj/pkgsrc into ...
Remember rcrun? →
I think a lot of people don’t realize rcrun exists, and run files in /etc/rc.d directly. If you’re one of those people, read the rcrun(8) manpage. Then, notice that Sascha Wildner has extended…
Parallelized buildworld now possible →
Buildworlds are now much faster, because they can run themselves in parallel. Invoke it using the -j option to make. Matthew Dillon saw a 25% reduction in time when using ‘make -j 12 buildworld’…
ldns update to 1.6.11 →
Jan Lentfer has updated ldns in DragonFly to version 1.6.11. This brings in a bunch of bugfixes, which can be viewed at the ldns site’s changelog.
November 2011
25 posts
Being a good BSD neighbor →
Adrian Chadd showed up on the DragonFly kernel@ mailing list, offering some help in keeping things compatible with FreeBSD and 802.11 networking. That’s quite neighborly of him, especially since…
Lazy Reading for 2011/11/27 →
Happy (post) Turkey Day for the U.S. readers! A light link week this week.
Facebook is bad for the Internet. ‘Gaslighting’ is a new term to me. As that article points out, I can’t even put my…
Binutils update to 2.22 →
Binutils in DragonFly is now up to version 2.22 – the commit linked is one of several.
Even more Postgres results →
Francois Tigeot has updated his PDF of Postgres benchmarks with some OpenIndiana results. They’re crazy high, though he reported some freezes too, as with Linux.
BSDTalk 208: Teaching BSD →
BSDTalk 208 is out, where Will Backman talks for 15 minutes about how he uses BSD in his University of Maine UNIX class.
More network speed improvements as reported by... →
Sepherosa Ziehau has implemented another networking speedup. Read the commit message for details on what he changed, since it’s rather in-depth. He shows an 18% improvement in netperf results.
Video and USB fix →
Matthew Dillon has written a contiguous memory mapper, which is designed to fix problems with video cards and USB drives that need a big chunk of memory to keep. This can affect booting or later…
Lazy Reading for 2011/11/20 →
Hey, the date’s sorta palindromic! Sorta.
“Bundled, Buried and Behind Closed Doors” – a video description of the physical parts of the Internet. Remember when MAE-East or MAE-West would have a…
Linux results for that Postgres benchmarking →
Remember the Postgres benchmark I described here a few days ago? Francois Tigeot has updated it with numbers from Scientific Linux running the same pgbench procedure. (see page 2) If you’re too…
New bug tracker →
DragonFly now uses Redmine for bugs.dragonflybsd.org. This means that the bugs@ and submit@ lists have can still be read by anyone, but to post a new bug or patch, or reply, you need to be …
New clang 3.0 and DragonFly work →
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado has been working with clang and DragonFly, along with Sascha Wildner. DragonFly mostly compiles using clang, with lib/citrus being (the only? one of?) the last…
Huge speed improvements, plus graphs →
The two things that make my day! The work on DragonFly-current has led to some significant speed improvements. So good, that Samuel Greear’s post on OSNews.org links to graphed results from him…
Lazy Reading for 2011/11/13 →
I’m going for more verbose linking. Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it? If not – too late!
NYCBUG posts audio of their regular…
HEADS UP: package recompilation needed →
The presence of /usr/include/crypt.h in DragonFly (starting in December 2010) meant that some programs compiled during that time will expect that file to always be there. It was recently removed, so…
Ways to eliminate C++ →
In DragonFly, there’s only a few places C++ is used. If you wanted to make sure DragonFly was pure C, Samuel Greear lists those remaining nooks and crannies.
Do you have a lot of RAM? I mean, a LOT!? →
You can now have, in theory, up to 32 terabytes of RAM on your 64-bit DragonFly system, from a change made by Matthew Dillon. I’m curious to see if anyone has even 1 terabyte, as that’s at least…
Do you have a Geode? Well, good news! →
John Marino added tuning support within GCC 4.4 for the Geode CPU. Waaaay back when, these were x86 -compatible Cyrix chips. Nowadays I think they are most common in single-board computers.
Pull pkgsrc from git again →
Some cleanup in the CVS -> git process wasn’t happening, so if you have been using pkgsrc 2011Q3 from git (i.e. via make in /usr), re-pull to make sure you have everything.
(The post noting this…
TIM number two →
The Technology Innovation Management Review (used to be the Open Source Business Resource) has its second issue out since the rename. There’s still plenty of open-source focus in there.
Have you…
Lazy Reading for 2011/11/06 →
A bumper crop of articles to read this week.
Ruby went to a BSD license. That’s nice to see. Commence licensing argument in 3… 2…
DragonFly BSD on Ohloh hasn’t been updated in months – it…
Structure changes mean recompilation →
This recent structure change (are there others like this? Maybe?) means that existing binaries may need to be recompiled for anyone tracking DragonFly master. This probably means that an upgrade…
COMPAT_43 and COMPAT_DF12 gone →
Well, they’re still available, but you don’t want them in your config any more because they can slow you down. This will only affect you if you are running binary files from DragonFly 1.2 or…
More multi-core improvements →
Matthew Dillon wrote up an explanation of how performance on systems with a lot of CPU cores has been significantly improved – up to 300%! (He says 200%, but I think he’s treating it as a…
Libhammer added →
Antonio Huete Jimenez’s ‘libhammer‘, a library to make various Hammer functions available to userland programs, has been added. It implements ‘hammer info’ only at this point, if I understand…
Postgres performance speedups, possibly →
Samuel Greear, Jan Lentfer, and others are looking at Postgres scaling on DragonFly. The work they are doing isn’t in the tree yet, but here’s a graph showing some of the performance differences.
October 2011
29 posts
Lazy Reading for 2011/10/30 →
It’s snowing in the northeast U.S., which makes me happy! Keep going, sky!
Richard Stallman’s requirements when giving talks/lectures. (via) I read this not unreasonable but long list and…
Reduced memory usage →
Francois Tigeot does something very useful: he monitors the resource usage on his systems, and tracks how it changes over time. Because of that, he noticed that the recent VM changes in DragonFly…
DragonFly and jails →
Michael Lucas is building jails on DragonFly, and his story of doing so works pretty well as a how-to guide.
GCC updated →
John Marino’s moved GCC from 4.4.6 to 4.4.7, but you’ll have to see the changelog for details. Except it’s so new it isn’t listed… yet.
Got 10G Ethernet? Here’s an improvement →
Sepherosa Ziehau made some changes that led to a 10% and then 20% gain (don’t know if that was cumulative or separate) in network speed for DragonFly. That’s great! It only has a noticeable…
A new Hammer presentation →
Francois Tigeot recently presented a set of slides about Hammer at a recent Irill conference. PDFs of the slides are available at his site, in English and French.
DragonFly and Postgres and testing too →
DragonFly’s now on the BuildFarm list of Postgres test systems. (via Jan Lentfer in IRC)
BSDDay 2011 in Slovakia →
Did you know that there’s a BSDDay 2011 in Bratislava, Slovakia, on November 5th? Well, I do thanks to a random Google search and now you do too. You and I both need to keep watching BSD Events.
