The logs from regular DragonFly builds are now available as they are completed. It’s i386 right now, with x86_64 on the way.
pf progress
Jan Lentfer posted about his progress on upgrading pf. He has pickups working, but on on a per-rule basis; he’s looking for feedback on how important this option is for other users.
07/27/2010
Another compilation site, plus me complaining
Dru Lavigne linked to AboutBSD.net; it’s an aggregate site that compiles the RSS feeds from a number of BSD sites.
It doesn’t list any news from this site. I had a conversation with “Psyber.Monkey”, the maintainer some months ago and I pointed out that since it was copying posts wholesale, it sounded like I was writing for that website instead of my own, and it didn’t note the source, or even keep my name with my work. He said he’d address that and remove my copied posts until it was fixed. It looks like it hasn’t been addressed.
The BSD license (for example) allows for copying work, but it doesn’t allow you to strip the author’s name off the work. The AboutBSD.net articles at least link back to the original articles now, but I’d like to see more specific attribution, as is done at other places that quote people’s work, like KernelTrap or even (usually) Slashdot.
I don’t want to sound too cranky about it, as he did reach out and check, which is a first – normally I just see my writing surface on aggregate feed sites, and that’s the earliest I hear of it.
07/26/2010
GPT, please
Is it time to move to GPT instead of the traditional fdisk/disklabel combo? Petr thinks so. There’s some work to do, though.
07/25/2010
Network Flow Analysis: a review
Michael Lucas sent me a copy of his newest book, Network Flow Analysis, on the grounds that I read it and write what I thought. While book reviews aren’t usual fare for this site, it’s appealing to write something different from my usual brief summaries.
(more after the jump…)
pkgsrc-2010Q2 out, I think
I haven’t seen an announcement at all, but I’m inferring that it’s out. I’ll be changing the DragonFly build machines momentarily.
07/23/2010
BSDA Exam locations and dates
Dru Lavigne has posted a list of upcoming locations for BSDA exams; look for one near you, as this list is globe-spanning.
07/22/2010
pf: farther along
Jan Lentfer has more on his progress updating pf in DragonFly to a more recent version. He’s looking for testers, especially ones with a more complex pf setup.
BSDTalk: Hipp and Fossil SCM
BSDTalk 194 has a conversation with D. Richard Hipp, about the Fossil “distributed software configuration management system”.
07/21/2010
Slightly less RSS
For some reason, the direct links to recent Digest articles wasn’t working on the DragonFly site’s main page. I’ve disabled it for now, but there’s always the feed here, or Twitter, or Tumblr.
07/19/2010
HEADS UP: many changes from kqueue and LVM2
Matthew Dillon posted a warning about both Samuel Greear’s kqueue work and Alex Hornung’s LVM2 work. Both are now committed to DragonFly 2.7. These are dramatic (and useful!) changes, so some instability may happen for bleeding-edge users. His post does include some minor detail on what was touched.
iwn(4) support added
Joe Talbott’s ported over iwn(4), which is the “driver for Intel 1000, 5100, 5150, and 6000 wifi chipsets.”
07/17/2010
New pkgsrc Hackathon planned
There’s an online hackathon (the 14th!) planned for July 30th through August 2nd for pkgsrc (and probably some NetBSD material too) at FreeNode/#netbsd-code on IRC. Aleksej Saushev’s post has more details. At least it’s cheap to attend!
BSD-Day 2010 in Hungary
November 20th, 2010 is the date for BSD-Day, in Budapest. Gabor Pali has a note out inviting developer to attend and give talks. There’s more details on a FreeBSD wiki page.
07/16/2010
More mandoc madness
Undeadly has an article up about recent work on mandoc in a mini-hackathon. It’s mentioned in context with OpenBSD in the article, but mandoc is also present in DragonFly, and is a potential groff replacement. (And I think groff is the last item in base requiring C++? I may be wrong.) Plus, as I’ve said before, I like mandoc’s output. It would be nice to use that for our online man pages, for instance.
Another GSoC update
David Shao has updated his GSoC project page on the DragonFly website. His project is updating DRM/GEM/KMS for BSD systems. It’s a huge but important piece of work. This update brings news on updates to locking systems and data structures.
07/15/2010
New kevent for testing
Samuel J. Greear’s work on his Google Summer of Code project, unifying the select/poll/kevent subsystem into kevent, is already available for testing. Any testing – just booting, or running X, or other simple tasks – is useful, as this new system touches many things.
An easy way to use clang
Sascha Wildner has set up $CCVER so that it can be used with ‘clangsvn’. If you install clang from svn into /usr/local, it’ll get picked up and used as the system compiler.
07/14/2010
Oh look, it’s LVM2!
Alex Hornung has imported LVM2 from NetBSD, along with cryptsetup and dm. (Not dm(8), but devicemapper) LVM(8) stands for Logical Volume Management, and it makes storage management much easier; you may have encountered it on NetBSD or Linux. Those additional tools make it possible to encrypt volumes. Alex has published details on how to use it.
Also: Alex’s not-really-related-but-I -mistakenly-linked-to-it udev/libdevattr work.
07/13/2010
Reminder: use serno
Using ‘serno’, meaning specifying disks by serial number rather than path, is a good idea. If you have a machine that started out as an older DragonFly installation, it may be a good idea to use this feature.
07/12/2010
Messylaneous: reading, catchup
I apologize; I’ve been missing. Here’s some misc links while I get back in gear:
- A very good reason to be interested in Hammer over ZFS: nobody will threaten lawsuits over Hammer.
- 10 tricks for admins. I’m posting it cause I can never remember that thing with tunneling ssh out. (via)
- This Gaming Life, as a free download. An excellent book that is in physical form on my shelf right now. Yes, unrelated.
07/06/2010
HEADS UP: ehci.ko is always there
EHCI support is now always on, for 2.7 users, and will be for 2.8 when released. It’s possible to turn it off if it causes a problem, but it should generally just mean better USB performance.
07/03/2010
mkinitrd added for the future
Alex Hornung recently added mkinitrd(8), a tool for building a RAM disk early in the boot process. What’s it for? It’s needed to support more interesting bootable volumes, like LVM2, encrypted disks, or iscsi roots, all of which I’d like to see.
Periodical frenzy!
There’s several publications with new issues out. It’s a long weekend (in the U.S.) so you can catch up on the reading/listening:
BSD Magazine has a new issue out, on OpenBSD. There’s also the happy news that they’ve managed to more than double their circulation.
The July issue of the Open Source Business Resouce is out, with the theme “Go To Market”. Next month is “Interdisciplinary Lessons”, and submissions are due in the next two weeks.
BSDTalk 192 is out with an interview of Colin Percival, the FreeBSD Security Officer. It’s another interview from BSDCan 2010. Colin Percival is also responsible for, among other things, tarsnap.com, which I find interesting because of its clear and modern business model.
07/02/2010
SoC kqueue progress
Samuel Greear has a whole page about his Google Summer of Code kqueue project, recently updated.
07/01/2010
A trick for updating moved packages
Sometimes, packages are renamed in pkgsrc, usually because of a version change. If that happens, it can be hard to find the replacement. You can manually add them, or there’s a trick to make the build ‘jump’ to the new name.
NYCBSDCon call for papers
NYCBSDCon, happening November 12-14th, in New York City, at Cooper Union, has a call for papers out. (via here and also George) They’re due by the end of July.
06/30/2010
BSD Magazine back issues
BSD Magazine sent out a link to all the BSD Magazine back issues, reproduced here for your enjoyment:
06/29/2010
Real world use and DragonFly
Siju George has written up his ‘real world’ experience with DragonFly in production; I should probably do the same since this site has been DragonFly-driven for years now. Add your story to the page.
Potential applicable power project
Matthew Dillon followed up on some comments from Sepherosa Ziehau about power management to describe a possible new way to manage power consumption; the project is up for grabs.
06/28/2010
New power controls
Matthew Dillon has added powerd(8), a daemon that adjusts CPU frequency based on activity; his initial report describes a whopping 40% power savings for server use.
06/27/2010
Messylaneous: Reviews, packaging, installers, etc
Link catchup!
- The BSD Certification Group needs reviewers for the BSDA exam objectives. It’s as easy as writing on a wiki.
- Undeadly has a lengthy article up about the OpenBSD equivalent of pkgsrc bulk builds, called dbp3. Interesting, because it was constructed on purpose, for that purpose. It’s interesting to me because I have pbulk running all the time, and it’s not as liner a process as I’d like.
- The PC-BSD installer is now present in FreeBSD; I think this is based on the same original installer used for DragonFly. Maybe, maybe not, but I’m curious about the feature set if it’s able to displace the venerable and firmly lodged FreeBSD sysinstall.
- Off topic: I bought an Android-based phone recently, so this (kinda grody) comment on how Apple handles bad reception for the new iPhone is entertaining.
- Really off topic: this man’s conversation about polyhedral dice (Youtube) is strangely compelling. You may or may have needed to play tabletop games previously to really appreciate it. (via)
06/26/2010
Which desktop to use?
pkgsrc git repo changes
Matthew Dillon set up a git copy of the pkgsrc repository some time ago. However, it’s had syncing problems, and there’s an ‘official’ pkgsrc git repository now which does not have the problems. You can still pull from the same place, but it’s the ‘master’ branch now. His heads-up message describes how to switch.
06/24/2010
Another image
Not actually related to DragonFly except by coincidental name, but it’s entertaining and imageblogging is fun. (via, some other images there nsfw)
06/22/2010
Free book, if you are lucky
Michael Lucas is giving away a limited number of copies of his new Network Flow Analysis book. Post something clever and you may get it. Please don’t be more clever than me, though, as I want a copy.
06/21/2010
Congratulations, Dru
Dru Lavigne is the new “Director of Community Development” for PC-BSD. I am totally jealous, and she is the perfect person for the job.
NYCBSDCon date set
November 12-14th, in New York City, at Cooper Union.
06/17/2010
BSDTalk 192: pf, Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen
There’s a new BSDTalk podcast up, again from BSDCan 2010. This one interviews Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen about pf, for 20 minutes.
Freeze for pkgsrc-2010Q2 starts about now
It’s been 0.25 years since the last, so pkgsrc is due for another quarterly release. The usually-two-week freeze before release starts tonight. The release should happen at the end of the month.
06/16/2010
EuroBSDCon 2010 call for papers
EuroBSDCon 2010 is happening October 8th-10th in Karlsruhe, Germany. (I’ll let you guess the year.) The Call for Papers is out now. The website lists it as “Call for Speakers“, but you have to write an abstract so I suppose that’s close enough. (via lots of places)
06/15/2010
png update in pkgsrc
06/14/2010
Better than yet another acronym
Venkatesh Srinivas has quoted a good phrase to sum up the work he and Matthew Dillon are doing to remove the Big Lock: ‘Less Lock, More Rock’
Qemu notes
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
06/13/2010
Progress update on pf
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.
More lazy reading
Normally I nab a few links from Christian Neukirchen’s blog for my Messylaneous link roundups, but his latest entry has more good ones than I can steal comfortably. Go read.
06/12/2010
Messylaneous – Unixy articles, clang, pkgsrc projects, more
- IBM’s developerWorks has an article up about GNU screen. It’s not BSD-specific, but the tips in using screen are useful. (Before someone brings it up: yes, tmux too.)
- Another article talks about inspecting network traffic using various tools including tcpdump and wireshark. It is a tremendous advantage to see what happens on a network at the most basic level, so this is a good skill to pick up.
- Oh, and “Setting up UNIX file systems” and “10 steps to Unix nirvana“.
- FreeBSD now ships with clang. (via) I know DragonFly (mostly?) works with clang… Could we switch?
- “hwstat” will gain DragonFly support soon.
- Firmware for ral(4) has been added by Joe Talbott.
- Thomas Klausner has a writeup of some project ideas or goals taken from the recent pkgsrcCon. A followup has me thinking: if the -uu option updates dependent packages with pkg_add, does that mean ‘pkg_radd -uu packagename” will do all updating possible based on available binary packages? Worth trying.
06/11/2010
BSD links plz
I did some cleanup on the various BSD links I have on the sidebar of this site; are there any sites I’m missing? I’d like to be as complete as possible. Please supply URLs.
(Be warned that some messages may not show up immediately because links in comments will rarely trigger the spamfilter – I’ll check for them.)
Facebook and DragonFly, but not on purpose
Looking for DragonFly BSD in Google will occasionally turn up wierd things: the release ISOs scattered amongst other not-so-free software, or poorly cut-and-pasted documentation in a splog. This is the oddest recently: a direct copy of the Wikipedia page on DragonFly, placed on Facebook, with a big tag at the top saying “Sign up for Facebook to connect with DragonFly BSD”.
Except there’s no DragonFly on Facebook. I assume it’s a group formed by some Facebook user. The whole “sign up to connect” item rankles me a bit; signing up for Facebook isn’t going to get you more DragonFly; it’s just going to waste your time.
Welcome new commiter: Venkatesh Srinivas
Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.
06/10/2010
Specific steps for multiprocessing
Matthew Dillon’s outlined the exact steps for converting to coarse locking, and he’s looking for volunteers to convert files, according to the guidelines he described. If you’re looking for maybe two hours of work that would make a big difference, here’s your chance.
New BSDTalk: clang clang clang
BSDTalk has a very timely interview with Roman Divácký and Ed Schouten about the switch to clang/LLVM in FreeBSD. It’s 17 minutes, recorded at the recent BSDCan 2010.
06/09/2010
Holy crap, 4,000 posts!
This technically is the 4,001st post. The Twitter feed is read far more than I expected, too.
I’ll update the layout to celebrate.
Recompile again, plus multiprocessing details
Matthew Dillon’s made changes again that require a full world and kernel rebuild, if you’re following the bleeding edge. There’s also discussion of the underlying principles of the token-based multiprocessor work he’s planning.
06/08/2010
Standards: we got ‘em
They may be low, but Sascha Wildner has documented them.
(I am making a joke that probably only makes sense to native English speakers. Sorry.)
06/07/2010
More pcc notes
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
BSD Magazine: Firewalls
The June issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the theme is: Firewalls.
06/06/2010
Structure changes means recompilation
If you’re running DragonFly 2.7, you will need to do a full rebuild on your next update. Matthew Dillon has made some changes because of his lwkt_token work. Making parts of DragonFly subsystems multi-processor safe should be much easier now.
Extra DNS tools
Jan Lentfer has committed ldns and drill to DragonFly, in (unlikely) chance that you managed to delete BIND from pkgsrc (installed by default on 2.7+) and somehow couldn’t replace it.
06/04/2010
Mandoc, mdocml, and usage
There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
06/03/2010
How to get more wireless drivers
Joe Talbott wants to write DragonFly/BSD drivers for a whole slew of wireless devices. These are also all the adapters he doesn’t physically have. You can fix this by purchasing something off that page, which will ship right to him. A bwi(4) driver is next, for instance.
06/02/2010
Software additions: proplib, wpi, ioprio
bmake(1)ing a list, checking it twice
I found this reference list of targets for bmake very useful, especially because I can never remember them all. Unfortunately, the site where it’s located appears to be going away at the end of the month, but it should resurface on a new NetBSD wiki.
06/01/2010
BSDTalk 190: Michael Lucas
BSDTalk 190 has 20 minutes of conversation with Michael Lucas, one of my favorite authors, about his new book, “Network Flow Analysis“. He is also responsible for other BSD books.
June OSBR: Growing Business
The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and it has a number of articles about growth and open source. It’s a mix of “how-to” and “how-we-did” articles.
05/31/2010
dragonflybsd.org upgrade
www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.
05/30/2010
GEM and KMS progress for GSoC
Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.
Things to eat up your day
It’s a holiday weekend, at least in the United States, so I’m posting few things that take time to view.
Murray Stokely mentioned this in a comment, but it’s juicy enough to warrant a post: the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube has all 17 of the recent AsiaBSDCon 2010 presentations, plus a lot more from other conferences.
Phil Foglio, the fellow who drew the original BSD Daemon, has several comics strips, all of which are available for free – Buck Godot (complete), MythAdventures (in progress), What’s New with Phil and Dixie (in progress), and Girl Genius (in progress and in print).
05/27/2010
Messylaneous for 2010/05/27: destroying flash, Unix, programming
I had a sudden buildup of things to link to. It’s three items, but there’s enough info here to eat a few hours…
- Flash Destroyer: (destroying hardware, not like what Apple’s trying) found via the howling void, which of course has lots of complaints about technical inaccuracy. Still, interesting to contrast this with swapcache usage. The Bus Pirate on that site also sounds interesting.
- Handling multiple SSH keys in your SSH config: talks about one issue that came out of a larger IBM developerWorks UNIX tips article which is part of a larger series. I may have linked to parts of it before; it’s firmly packed with usefulness. Seriously, go read.
- Dru Lavigne linked to this article about the future of software development, and I agree with her: it’s a good prediction of the very near future.
05/26/2010
More event tracing work
Aggelos Economopoulos posted more details on his event tracing library, accompanied by a rash of commits. He’s interested in feedback.
Big network stack changes
Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
05/24/2010
Long-term swapcache results
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.
05/23/2010
New HOWTO: swapcache
Dylan Reinhold has contributed a HOWTO document on setting up swapcache. Thanks, Dylan!
05/22/2010
Last-ditch disk effort
YONETANI Tomokazu pointed out something that could be useful in the future: when you start getting drive errors, before you throw it out, try lowering the speed. Maybe it’s a cable problem, if you’re lucky.
05/21/2010
BSD Magazine: Industrial
Not the music, but the setting. The May issue of BSD Magazine is out, though there isn’t a page for it on the website yet. Instead, I’ll point at the PDF.
(I posted about the last issue twice, didn’t I? Oops.)
05/19/2010
Projects and money available
As described on the kernel@ mailing list, there’s several code bounties out now, formed in part from GSoC projects that didn’t get a slot. All of them have money waiting behind them. (I’d sure like to see better interrupt routing.)
05/18/2010
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
As McLone points out, the filesystem comparison page on Wikipedia is missing some Hammer details. Anyone want to fill in the pertinent numbers?
More Gource and BSD
Paul Onyschuk went and created a very neat and very long Gource movie using one of the oldest codebases out there: NetBSD. It’s available on Vimeo. His original data is available if anyone wants to try something similar.
Messylaneous for 2010/05/18: Facebook, fsck
A brief history of fsck (via) Is “A Brief History of X” a meme all by itself? Searching on it gave me this book of course, but also this interesting article about Internet history.
I’ve been restraining myself from a Facebook rant (other than deleting my Facebook account), as there’s plenty of people complaining about Facebook out there. This description, however, is as good a reason as anything for why there’s better choices.
Speaking of getting away from Facebook and fsck, apparently a “dirty Unix joke” made it into a New York Times photo about Facebook alternatives. (via)
That was my best segue ever.
Totally unrelated now: “Clicky” keyboards, and various links about them. (via) There’s at least a few person who’s going to read those links and get excited based on a mix of nostalgia and utility.