David Rhodus has checked in a new version of BIND, which may correct the recently discovered possible DoS. (commit notes don’t specify.)
Month: November 2003
11/28/2003
Timing
So, it looks like this:
From an offhand comment Matt Dillon made, the first ‘release’ of Dragonfly is planned at least several months from now. (No definite date yet.) FreeBSD-5 should be entering a stable branch (5.3) around the same time, and the stable 2.6 Linux kernel should be appearing around mid-December, close to the same time as FreeBSD 5.2. KDE 3.2 should also be out in February. Gnome 2.6 is due in March.
So, early 2004 looks like it will have much to play with.
11/27/2003
ekkoBSD link
Not much to report, in part because of the U.S. holiday, so here’s a link to a recently-announced OpenBSD variant: ekkoBSD.
11/25/2003
libcaps in
Matt Dillon has added in a new ‘libcaps’ library, mostly for experimentation, which appears to be the base for userland threading.
Post quoted:
More…
11/24/2003
No new groups … yet
Probably in part because of a long-running off-topic SCO thread in dragonfly.kernel, ‘trent’ suggested an advocacy or general group. Matt Dillon said “in a few months, just prior to the first release”.
k5admin -> kadmin
Emiel Kollof plans to change the Heimdal utilities to a format more similar to other platforms, unless someone else wants it.
11/23/2003
No contrib changes
In a conversation about updating bind, several people noted that changes other than vendor updates to contrib can wait until there’s a complete packaging system in place. (i.e. things like bind and sendmail are staying in place, for now.)
11/21/2003
Start cleanly
There’s been a number of people reporting various breakages during install or boot time. To weed out problems caused by old data right away, remember to:
rm -rf /usr/obj
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
Upcall mechanism in
Matt Dillon added an “upcall mechanism to support userland LWKT”. You can look at the man page for upc_register in source.
11/20/2003
Another microkernel project
In a followup to the K42 post, Max Laier pointed at the L4Ka project, which is somewhat similar in scope.
An interesting confluence
Michal Ostrowski, a developer with the K42 project at IBM Research, posted to dragonfly.kernel and noted that DragonFly and K42 are very similar in design and could benefit from interaction. He brought up several papers located on their site: a K42 overview, K42 and traditional UNIX APIs, and K42′s threading and scheduling infrastructure. The closely-related Tornado operating system also has some good information.
I’ve been playing too much Day of Defeat; I see ‘KAR98‘ every time I read K42. The project’s not about a teutonic WW2 rifle, though – the name K42 has a different origin.
SCO hints at widening suit
Jeroen Ruigrok pointed out this Newsforge article that says SCO will probably be bringing the AT&T settlement over BSD into court. According to people’s opinions, however, this is a last legal flailing, rather than anything that will significantly affect BSD-derived systems like DragonFly.
Daemonnews also has a mention of this, where Marc Rassbach points out the article’s author has a ‘poison pen’ history vs. BSD products, and Peter Hansteen notes a Forbes article on SCO, this Byte article, and the ever-bearded Greg Lehey’s excellent appraisal of this mess.
Improved installation writeup
I’ve corrected my how-to-install writeup, based on what several people said in dragonfly.kernel. Several steps are now removed, but it still has the same flavor.
11/19/2003
Release styles
According to Matt Dillon, DragonFly will skip the multiple branch style of FreeBSD (STABLE, CURRENT branches) and tag the single main branch, slipping as needed for security fixes.
11/18/2003
1.0-CURRENT
Aaaand it’s done – rebuilding your system with current sources will give you a uname that reports “DragonFly”. Through some trickery, most ports are apparently not broken by this.
Name breakage
Matt Dillon’s bringing in the ‘DragonFly’ name to replace ‘FreeBSD’ in the source, which may break a number of things over the next few days, including all ports.
11/17/2003
The Grid, the BSD, and the Ugly
Jeroen Ruigrok suggested the Sun Grid Engine (FreeBSD version) as a project for anyone with time on their hands.
Light reading
Joshua Coombs asked about good books for BSD kernel/network programming. Jeroen Ruigrok listed: “The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD”, “Unix Internals: The New Frontiers”, and “The Design of the Unix Operating System”.
DrASCIIFly
From Joshua Coombs:
_ _
()()
_________| |_________
(_________\ /_________)
(_________/ \_________)
__/| |\__
| |
||
||
||
\/
11/14/2003
We’d still like to keep it that way
Yet more __P() macros have been removed. Check the commits record around the 13th to see. __P() should now be gone most everywhere except contrib.
Slow going
We had some power outages/surges here because of a windstorm, and my UPS didn’t handle it well, along with other local network equipment. So, I’ll be slow with news posts until I get my internal network in better working order.
gcc33 port override
Matt Dillon noted he would be creating a port override for gcc33, as the port from FreeBSD’s port tree doesn’t seem to work just right.
11/13/2003
MBWTest added
I’ll quote Matt Dillon’s entry cause I’m working late:
” The MBWTest program (/tmp/mbw1) attempts to figure out the L1 and L2 cache sizes and measures L1, L2, and non-cached linear memory bandwidth.”
11/12/2003
Routing tryouts
Joshua Coombs is kicking around the idea of modeling – or even implementing – his new routing model, in Perl.
11/11/2003
Matt Dillon’s schedule
This week Matt Dillon is doing:
- lwkt_token and IPI code optimization
- GCC 3.x (just for support of the next item)
- 64 bit AMD64 support
For those of you late to the party and wondering why his work schedule is spotlighted, Matt Dillon is the originator of the DragonFly project, and is doing much heavy lifting.
11/10/2003
XFree86 4.4 due soon
Not directly about DragonFly, but chances are good you are using it. Release 4.4 of XFree86 is due by the end of the month, and you can look at the changelog.
FreeBSD-5 boot
Matt Dillon’s added boot code from FreeBSD 5 – this allows AMD64 and ELF64 support. He also pushed in new linker code and some (not yet enabled) support for UFS2.
Use installkernel and installworld as part of your build process, and you should be fine with these changes. However, you will manually have to copy /usr/src/sys/boot/i386/loader/loader.rc to /boot.
There’s been a lot of new code lately – that’s good!
11/09/2003
CARP vs. VRRP
Jeroen Ruigrok supplied these links about patent issues with Cisco’s VRRP during a thread about importing OpenBSD’s CARP as part of pf.
http://www.in-addr.de/pipermail/lvs-users/2001-November/004135.html
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/477/1567
http://kerneltrap.org/comment/reply/477/1567
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=102883972229241&w=2
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/vrrp/current/msg00318.html
Variant symlinks arrive
Variant symlinks are possible now, though you currently have to set the sysctl vfs.varsym_enable. ‘varsym’ can be used to mess with them at any time, however.
Updated routing writing
Joshua Coombs has updated his writeup of a new routing model, based on feedback.
11/08/2003
Build from scratch
Matt Dillon’s reorganizing some of the header files; if you build a new kernel anytime soon, make sure you build from scratch using ‘config -r’, as some of the old header files have now vanished.
ifstat functionality
Changes to systat by Kenneth Culver gives it the ability to show each network interface and its throughput.
Network changes starting
Jeffrey Hsu and Matt Dillon’s network changes are being committed – the first third is in, according to a commit by Matt.
Matt describes the plan thusly:
“Basically the goal of this work is to isolate and serialize PCBs in specific threads in order to (A) not have to lock them and (B) improve cache locality for ISR processing loops as well as for data. Isolating a network PCB means dealing with the points where the PCB talks to other parts of the system. There are three points where this happens:
- incoming packets go through preprocessing (e.g. IP) before
being routed to the target protocol & PCB (e.g. TCP and UDP).- user syscalls operate on PCBs
- timers and such initiate work related to particular PCBs”
I wish I knew what a PCB was.
Not long until Long
Matt Dillon posted an interesting bit about what’s needed/planned for non-emulated use of the AMD64:
(post quoted)
More…
11/07/2003
100 Posts, and someone must be reading!
This site was mentioned in the BSD News section of the November DaemonNews ezine. Neat!
Plus, I’ve reached 100 posts! This is actually the 102nd, if I’m counting right, minus early test posts.
Aaaaand I broke the mailarchive.
Slightly broken
Matt Dillon’s putting in some material from FreeBSD-5, so if PNPBIOS is defined, you may not produce a working kernel during the next few days.
update: PNPBIOS should not be enabled if you have a AMD64 machine, and the K8V motherboard, as that appears to be broken.
Bugzilla brought in
Jeroen Ruigrok is setting up Bugzilla for tracking bugs/requests for DragonFly. As part of the process, there’s some 6,000 (!) items brought over from FreeBSD-4. No link yet…
Another driver
The 3c940 ethernet driver (found on ASUS K8V motherboards) is now supported. It’s the ‘sk’ device. Matt Dillon’s AMD64 machine apparently arrived.
11/05/2003
Kernel list backfilled
I was pointed at the gmane.org site to find old dragonfly.kernel postings. I moved in what was there, and so the local kernel archive has several months of history added in, now. Docs doesn’t seem to be working yet…
11/04/2003
Fix frenzy, mail archive
David Rhodus has been commiting a whole bunch of fixes from FreeBSD today. You can tell just by looking at the mailing list archive for commits@, freshly set up, and updated hourly along with the other archives.
Anyone have old list traffic sitting around, perhaps in mbox format? I’d like to backfill.
send-pr works
send-pr, the strange commandline utility for making a bug report, now goes to the bugs mailing list.
11/03/2003
Berkley slides on the web
Byron Schlemmer put up Matt Dillon’s slides from his Berkley talk as HTML pages.
11/02/2003
Notice there is no P in it
Eirik Nygaard has also cleaned out all the __P() in usr.bin and usr.sbin, and incidentally gained a commit bit. Congrabulations.
11/01/2003
Things to come
In a thread about booting media, Matt Dillon noted he was going to:
- Look at Jeff Hsu’s TCP thread code
- implement variant symlinks
- start VFS messaging and environments
VFS will make a number of other things – especially a new port system – possible.
Another DragonFly BSD site
till noted in a comment here that www.dragonflybsd.de is live, and is using the RDF feed from this site.
This is our OOL
Eirik Nygaard submitted a patch that removes over 700 instances of __P() from src/sbin/. It’s been committed.
