David Rhodus added the pst driver to the GENERIC kernel, so if you are trying to install to a machine using a Promise card as disk controller (for RAID, I assume), it oughta work.
Month: December 2003
12/23/2003
Exalting execline
Dan Melomedman, during a discussion about using/not using bash in the base system, pointed at execline as a better alternative to shell scripting.
12/20/2003
USER_LDT on by default
The kernel option USER_LDT is now on by default, as it’s useful for ports like Wine, or mplayer, and will be needed for threading. Suggested by Craig Dooley.
Yukon, not Cornelius
The Marvell Yukon chipset now supports multicast. A small thing, but I’m hurting for news.
12/16/2003
dragonflybsd.org down
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down, and the news server is not responding. I don’t know if this is planned or not.
Update an hour later: It’s OK.
NVIDIA, RCNG, mailarchives
Not much happening right now. A few people have noticed that the binary NVIDIA driver doesn’t seem to work; big surprise there, with the system being in rapid change. Otherwise, puttering with the new RCNG services layout continues. In local news, I have the DragonFly mail archive mostly working now, including the kernel list.
12/13/2003
bsd-airtools update
A dfports update for net/bsd-airtools has been committed; Craig Dooley noted that the device layout for DragonFly has changed, making this override needed.
12/12/2003
Even more RCNG goodness
Matt Dillon has enhanced the varsym/RCNG system to support the following “states” for various services:
| running | The service is running |
| failed | A start or stop operation failed |
| disabled | The service is disabled |
| irrelevant | The server is not needed |
| configured | The non-process service has been configured |
| stopped | The service has been stopped |
He also posted the following:
“Call for volunteers! There are many
rc.d/scripts which do not support ‘stop’. Things likesshdandrwho, for example. It would be great if interested parties could start adding ‘stop’ functionality to the more common services. Submit patch sets to submit@dragonflybsd.org”
USEBSD SIG Session
From Murray Stokely by way of Matt Dillon; a request for papers about BSD system use to present this summer in Boston:
“UseBSD will be a one-day special interest group session hosted as part of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston (June 27 – July 2, 2004). The focus of UseBSD, as the name implies, will be on showcasing ways in which creative members of the BSD community are making use of BSD-on the desktop, in embedded applications, in corporate data centers, in computational clusters, in business environments, and more!”
RCNG revs up
Matt Dillon’s updated RCNG in a big way. You can now check the status of, or start, stop, etc. different system services using appropriate single commands like rcstart, rcstop, rcrestart, and so on. varsym -sa will list service status.
The old way had you looking for the appropriate file in /etc/rc.d and issing commands for it, and having to poke throught ps -ax or /var/run/ to see what’s going.
To get this running, do make upgrade_etc in /usr/src/etc, or a regular build/installworld. Also, install /usr/src/sbin/rcrun, and reboot.
12/11/2003
New Team page
There’s a new Team page on the DragonFly website. I’m the one that put it together.
Autoconf sees DragonFly
Jeroen Ruigrok has previously sent in patches to autoconf that allow it to recognize DragonFly as a system, and this should now be in autoconf CVS.
12/10/2003
Sendfile set superior
Jeffrey Hsu has added a rather complex patch for sendfile(2); I’m going to link to the changelog rather than sum up.
ProPolice placed
Ryan Dooley’s patch giving stack-smashing protection in libc is in. It’s not on by default. It adds some overhead but little binary size when turned on.
2 handy scripts
Matt Dillon posted 2 scripts he finds handy for searching in the source tree. The first one is used on its own, with the argument being the search target:
#!/bin/csh
#
# /usr/local/bin/search
find . -type f -and -not -name '*.*o' -and -not -name '*.a' -and -not -name '*.kld' | fgrep -v ./compile | xargs egrep "$argv" | egrep -v 'Binary'
And the other script, used to pull files containing the searchterm into an editor like so: ‘vi `pullout searchterms`’
#!/bin/csh
#
# /usr/local/bin/pullout
/usr/local/bin/search $argv | awk -F : '{ print $1; }' | sort | uniq
Oh say can you C
Dave Leimbach pointed at Cyclone during a discussion of dealing with insecure functions like sprintf() and strcopy()
12/09/2003
AGP additions
Craig Dooley submitted a patch to add a number of improvements to agp, from FreeBSD5.
12/08/2003
ProPolice possible pick
Ryan Dooley proposed adding ProPolice to the base system, and already has a potential patch.
IPC finalized and soon complete
Matt Dillon will be finishing up IPC using the model mocked up in libcaps. This will enable functions like getpwuid() as an IPC serviceand out of libc. If I recall correctly, IPC = Inter-Process Communication, as acronyms are a common question lately.
lnc and vx in
Code to add the lnc and vx network drivers from FreeBSD-5 is in, put together by Joerg Sonnenberger. This is part of the PCI compat cleanup, though these just-added drivers just use newbus.
12/07/2003
Libcaps update
Libcaps, the library for userland threading, has been updated. Work is still proceeding on fp stave/restore, and some other tasks, including Galen Sampson’s work. Matt Dillon’s commit message sums it up as neatly as possible, so I’ll just paste it:
Major update to libcaps. Implement support for virtual cpus using
rfork_thread() and implement IPIs, per-virtual-cpu globaldata areas,
and per-virtual-cpu LWKT scheduling.
12/06/2003
Dragonfly takes off
Boeing’s X-50A rotor craft is apparently named the “Dragonfly“. No real relation to this project, but it’s fun to see other places the name is used.
12/04/2003
rsync remote exploit
David Rhodus noted that rsync is now at version 2.5.7 because of a remotely-exploitable heap overflow. Anyone running a rsync mirror, especially of DragonFly, should update. This is in part the exploit that damaged a Gentoo mirror and a GNU server.
libcaps halfway
Galen Sampson and Matt Dillon have committed the first stage of the userland threading – globaldata structure and thread primitives are connected, and libcaps can lock in a fashion similar to the existing kernel locks.
Temporary port fix
Peter Kadau noted that if you are building a program such as XFree86 and it complains about not being able to find a particular library that you know exists on your system, you can use cpdup to move it (between, for instance, /usr/local/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib).
This is a temporary fix. However, if you are experiencing this right now, it’s probably because of an out-of-date dfports. Delete all packages, update, and reinstall packages, and you should be OK.
12/03/2003
Quiet for a reason
I haven’t had any posts for the past day or so because there’s not been a lot of activity on the mailing lists, and I’m working up an ‘end-of-year’ report similar to the FreeBSD Status Reports. No link yet, cause it’s not done.
nrelease directory
/usr/src/nrelease has the ability to build the new ‘live’ CD iso images. Listed here is what Matt Dillon listed as possible make targets in that directory:
“release: This will do a full buildworld and buildkernel (GENERIC)
with the current source tree, then generate the release
ISO and directory structure in /usr/release.quickrel: This will do a ‘quick’ buildworld and buildkernel (i.e.
-DNOCLEAN) and then generate the release ISO and directory
structure in /usr/release.realquickrel: This is even faster. It assumes that the buildkernel and
buildworld have already been done and just generates the ISO
directory structure and ISO file in /usr/release.”
‘live CD’ available
Matt Dillon has created ‘live CD’ features, so you can boot from a DragonFly CD and get to a useable prompt. To support this, cpdup is now included in /bin, and mount_mfs now has the -C option, which will automatically copy a read-only filesystem into a MFS mount. An experimental ISO is available on the download page.
Be warned that you will have to lay out filesystems on your own with fdisk, disklabel, etc., and this is largely undocumented, except in the README.
More…
