Kernel

See the original letter here.

As planned before, I am now downloading DragonFlyBSD’s live iso and tend to install it soon.

The SMP case seems to have something wrong with it. My MARCH=p4 and -O optimized kernel often crashes when shutting down on beastieng.frontfree.net. Apparantly this is lock related (we can see the panic strings there not to be outputing atomically, and they just mixed with each other).

Dr. Alan Cox (alc@) has committed several improvements to FreeBSD’s VM implementation, and this brought significant performance gains on 5-CURRENT.

I personally manages several FreeBSD 5.2-CURRENT instances, and here are my experiences.

FreeBSD 5.x contained many new features, technologies. Currently, it’s clear that 5.2-CURRENT is more stable and have a better performance than 5.2(.1)-RELEASE. Therefore, if you are looking to install a new (of course, and ONLY if you choose 5.x series!) computer, the best solution would be 5-CURRENT.

Tim J Robbins (tjr@) has committed a set of utf8-ized versions of currently supported system locales. From the commit log:

Matt Dillon always do things which are amazing and earning our respect!! Today he announced a major change in DragonFly’s build architecture, while this will likely to cause some temporary quakes, we believe that the migration will be finished soon and we will have a much better (say, cleaner than FreeBSD’s approach) DragonFly buildworld path!

Robert today has sent a headsup to current@, claiming that he will merge his changes on p4 to cvs soon.

David O’Brien has announced the -O2 clean for AMD64 platform. Meanwhile, it seems that alpha has a -O2 clean build now!

Today Tom Rhodes (trhodes@) has committed a massive patch against FreeBSD-HEAD, allowing Intel C/C++ Compiler to build kernel. This change should not change the current gcc based build infrasture.