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…
Nov 30th
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…
Nov 29th
Binutils update to 2.22 →
Binutils in DragonFly is now up to version 2.22 – the commit linked is one of several.
Nov 27th
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.
Nov 26th
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.
Nov 25th
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.
Nov 24th
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…
Nov 22nd
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…
Nov 21st
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…
Nov 20th
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 …
Nov 19th
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…
Nov 18th
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…
Nov 17th
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…
Nov 14th
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…
Nov 13th
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.
Nov 12th
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…
Nov 11th
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.
Nov 10th
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…
Nov 9th
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…
Nov 8th
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…
Nov 7th
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…
Nov 4th
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…
Nov 4th
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…
Nov 2nd
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…
Nov 1st
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.
Nov 1st