Joerg Sonnenberger has updated GCC to GCC 3.4.4. Also, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert reports his experimental DragonFly system built entirely with GCC 4.0 is working well.
Month: May 2005
OpenBSD 3.7, interview
I missed this recently: OpenBSD 3.7 is out, and ONLamp.com/BSD has an interview with some of the developers.
Out of many, one. Out of one, many.
A recent thread about describing DragonFly’s kernel led to this post from Matthew Dillon, tying together monolithic kernels vs. microkernels and how they relate to DragonFly’s Single System Image future.
Journaling abounds
David Rhodus’s recent blog entry on GoBSD.com notes he is most of the way through a “block level journaling system for FFS/UFS”.
As I understand it, this is different from Matthew Dillon’s journaling work – this is the traditional form of journaling, while Dillon’s is a mechanism to treat disk activity as a relocatable/rewindable stream.
News slowed
Things have been quiet on the mailing lists for DragonFly, and I’m in the process of moving house, so news on this page may be intermittent for a week or two…
A start on 4
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has posted his patches for using GCC 4 to compile DragonFly – it works for the world, but not for the kernel, yet.
Firefox updated in dfports
Normally I don’t post about ports that much, but this is a pretty commonly used application: the dfports override for FireFox brings it to the more-secure 1.0.4., thanks to Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai’s commit.
libtool fix for pkgsrc
Joerg Sonnenberger has a fix for libtool in pkgsrc that may allow programs like orbit, arts, etc. to compile on DragonFly.(necessart for the Big Programs like KDE)
New at UnixReview.com
UnixReview.com has a reprinted SysAdmin Magazine article, among other updates, that talks about avoiding SQL injection attacks.
Network driver porting
Joerg Sonnenberger mentioned some of the gotchas involved in porting a network driver from another BSD flavor.
ONLamp: Securing Subversion
There’s a new entry in the FreeBSD Basics section of ONLamp.com: Setting up a Secure Subversion Server
Why not 4.0?
Joerg Sonnenberger listed a few links describing benchmarks with GCC 4.0, as part of a conversation on why he’s working on GCC 3.4.4 instead.
Hyper-Threading Dangers
Colin Percival of the FreeBSD Project discovered a security problem with “Hyper-Threading Technology”, found on newer Pentium 4 processors, where information from one thread can be read by another. He talked about it at BSDCan 2005 today (wish I was there!), and there’s a corresponding security alert for FreeBSD. The FreeBSD securing procedure should work for DragonFly, too.
Deep programming thread
Matthew Dillon, David Xu, and Joerg Sonnenberger have been having an extended conversation on kernel@ about RTLD, TLS, and other things – look for the “kernel library interfacing layer” topic if you want to browse it. All three of these guys are heavyweight kernel programmers, so it goes in-depth.
A Linux review?
UnixReview.com has a review up of the book “Linux in a Windows World“. Why mention this here? Because it doesn’t really cover Linux as much as it’s covering applications that run on Linux… All of which run on DragonFly too.
TCP ABC
Jeffrey Hsu has implemented TCP Appropriate Byte Counting for DragonFly, which is described in RFC 3465.
What’s a locore?
A question about the file locore.s led to a little computer hardware history lesson.
BSDTracker going on
I think this has been around for a while, but it was just posted on the GoBSD mailing list: NYCBUG has a BSD Tracker page, where businesses that use BSD can be listed. If that describes your workplace, get on there.
More subversions
Matthew Dillon has created a subversion for the 1.3 experimental code, in order to deal with the recent changes there, and also moved the RELEASE code up to 1.2.2, to incorporate a recent TLS fix.
That’s why it’s EXPERIMENTAL
Joerg Sonnenberger has a workaround for anyone who is running EXPERIMENTAL and tried to update within the last 24 hours or so.
OnLamp: installs and news
ONLamp/BSD has two new articles; one about getting NetBSD into difficult installs, and the other being the excellent and regular monthly news roundup for April.
Bearable breaking backwards
Matthew Dillon’s proposed a formula for a ‘kernel interfacing library layer‘, which should, among other things, ease the tranistion between major upgrades.
(Yeah, it’s a forced title. I liked the assonance.)
Two Minutes of Hate
‘walt’ posted a link to a book you mave have seen before: The Unix-Haters Handbook.
Mattography
If you can read Swedish, you can read Jonas Sundström’s entry about Matthew Dillon at unix.se.
MathML working
Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai sent along word that he got MathML working on DragonFly. Even better, he wrote down what he did.
FreeBSD security vulnerabilities
3 different security issues have been reported for FreeBSD; these may affect DragonFly because of its FreeBSD-4 heritage.
One tap too many
Have you ever hit the keyboard during boot and ended up on the boot.config prompt? And then, became annoyed that the path shown didn’t run by default? (I know I have.) YONETANI Tomokazu has a potential fix.
TLS in, GCC2 out
Matthew Dillon pointed out that the recent TLS work will make for much less complex code, and also means that GCC 2.95 will finally be retired from the DragonFly system.
UnixReview: Usenix, VSE, Certs
UnixReview.com has some new articles up: A review of Visual SlickEdit, a description of the USENIX @ 30 event, and an ongoing look at Server+ certification.
1.2 compatible
Matthew Dillon has added a set of compatibility libraries that will keep DragonFly 1.2 binaries working even after the drastic library changes going on now.
Pkgsrc HOWTO updated
Adrian Nida noted that he has updated his pkgsrc HOWTO located on the DragonFly Wiki.
Full build needed
Hiten Pandya has warned that his recent changes will require a full buildworld/buildkernel. This affects you only if you are running bleeding edge code, of course.