DragonFlyBSD Project Update - colo upgrade, future trends

[Michael Neumann]

On Mon, Jul 22, 2019 at 01:56:07PM -0700, Matthew Dillon wrote:
> John Marino (marino) pioneered the 'synth' system for dports and continues
> to help out, but his focus is on RavenPorts for now.  Rimvydas Jasinskas
> (zrj) and Antonio Huete Jimenez (tuxillo) have done a huge amount of work
> bringing dports back into operational form and getting the FreeBSD ports
> sync stuff working better.    DragonFlyBSD is still using synth, and will
> probably remain on synth for the foreseeable future, though there is always
> some discussion about how best to move dports forwards.  It's an excellent
> build platform for us.

At first, let me thank you and everyone else involved for all the great
work that went into this project in the recent years! I am happily using
DragonFly since many years on my main desktop machine and on all my
servers, just recently had to switch my laptop to Linux because I had to
run a Windows VM. DragonFly can be a bit rough at times, especially when
you want to develop Android apps or embedded stuff. Too sad that most
people just care about Linux and don't write portable software :(

As Ravenports made very good progress since it's existence and IMHO is
superior in design, I was hoping that it will become the standard ports
system for DragonFly one day. Reading your comment above makes me think
that this won't happen soon or at all :)

> Francois Tigeot (ftigeot) has done a ton of work taking DRM up to
> Linux-4.7.10 and this has worked very well for Intel iGPUs.  We are now
> finally starting to dive into Linux's 'amdgpu' subsystem which is much
> older, in order to modernize our AMD support (which is still deficient).
>  Numerous other people have spent a considerable amount of time helping
> test GPU support and tracking down bugs.  The work is ongoing.

Does that mean that there is a plan to support the embedded GPU of Zen2?

> I apologize for only writing everyone's names in plain ascii :-)

My name appeared three times in the list below, and I wasn't even
drinking :)

> Right now HAMMER2 makes for an excellent single-device filesystem
> (extremely well given that it supports writable snapshots and compression
> out of the box), but it remains deficient when it comes to expandable
> storage, multiple devices, and clustering.  This will be active work for me
> but honestly the amdgpu support has to come first so it's still going to be
> a long-haul for HAMMER2.

One thing I was really hoping for is a HAMMER2 equivalence to "hammer
mirror-copy", or "zfs send/receive". My server is still on HAMMER1 and I
really enjoy being able to continuously back it up. That's the only
thing I am missing in HAMMER2.

There are four more things on my DragonFly wishlist:

- Working Bluetooth stack (so I can use my headset)

- USB Webcam support (V4L)

- Hardware virtualization ("bhyve", to run Windows :)

- RISC-V port :D

Best regards,

  Michael