The scheduler has been rewritten by Matthew Dillon – again! Except this time, it’s very close to the original CSRG implementation. The eventual goal is to allow other schedulers to be used, on the fly.
Month: June 2005
FreeBSD plans
OSNews has an interview about what’s planned for FreeBSD. Not much bearing on DragonFly, other than it’s interesting to see where the design goals match and diverge.
06/29/2005
Polling a fast one
Matthew Dillon hints that using polling may be a way to get a finicky PCMCIA network card to work.
Best fd allocator EVAR!
Jeffrey Hsu has replaced the FreeBSD-based file descriptor allocator with a new algorithm of his own design, apparently influenced by Solaris. It scales like no other.
Quick reference trick
Hiten Pandya describes ‘makewhatis -o local-manpages.txt‘ as a quick trick to make a reference list of available utilities.
06/28/2005
DRI testers wanted
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert is looking for people willing to test his DRM/DRI changes; if you’ve got a 3D card (ATI Radeon, Matrox, etc.), contact him for instructions on testing.
UnixReview.com: shell tricks
UnixReview.com has an article on some miscellaneous tasks that can be accomplished with some clever shell scripting.
Handbook as printable PDF
The Handbook is at 828 7″x9″ pages, going by what Jeremy Reed produced. (Link goes to a PDF.)
06/27/2005
New Committer
Jeremy C. Reed, of bsdnewsletter.com fame, is the newest DragonFly committer, and has been tackling the dangerous task of documentation!
New Installer
Chris Pressey announced a new version of the most excellent BSD Installer. Among other changes, it is rewritten in Lua, allows kernel module loading, gettext support, and … go read the announcement yourself.
Trying gcc4.0
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert posted these steps for trying out gcc 4.0, which is in DragonFly but not yet part of the build process.
BSD and Google Summer of Code
There’s 28 BSD projects in Google’s Summer of Code project. The 8 NetBSD-sponsored projects are already listed. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer.)
06/25/2005
First the house, now the street
The street where shiningsilence.com is hosted (my house) has been having electrical outages over the course of today; they’re lasting longer than my UPS can handle, so access may be intermittent if the power goes out again.
06/24/2005
FreeBSD binary updates
Chris Coleman has BSDUpdates.com, with free binary security upgrades for FreeBSD 5.3. There’s a good description on BSDNews about the service, though it doesn’t cover how it works in-depth. “BSDUpdates” suggests that this may be extended to the other BSDs at some point; it’d sure be handy for DragonFly once the development pace slows.
Sendmail update
Sendmail 8.13.4 is in DragonFly, though I don’t know if it’s hooked into the build yet.
SPLout!
It’s a little late to mention this, because it’s either complete or close to complete, but Matthew Dillon and others have been removing SPL sections in code (there were more than 500 locations) and replacing them with critical sections. This is an important step on the road to Giant Lock-free SMP.
06/23/2005
pkgsrc bleeding edge
Joerg Sonnenberger is working on pkgsrc for DragonFly, as are a number of other developers; you can obtain his latest changes at: (Caveat emptor!)
Old timer still around
Remember TIMER_USE_1? It’s still available as hw.i8254.walltimer=1 if you need it. If you are unsure, you’re probably fine.
However, DragonFly will be using the ACPI timer, so it will be a moot point.
Libre Software Meeting
The Libre Software Meeting is taking place in Dijon, France, July 5th to July 9th. DragonFly is not specifically referenced there, but it’s for open source in general.
06/21/2005
Linux vs. BSD systems
The same set of questions about Linux vs. BSD was asked of several people: Linus Torvalds (Linux), Theo De Raadt (OpenBSD) and Christos Zoulas (NetBSD), and Matthew Dillon (DragonFly BSD). (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer)
06/20/2005
Return to normal
I have a semi-functional electrical system and a partial network up, so regular newsposts should resume. Sorry about the extended hiatus – it wasn’t supposed to take this long!
New mbuf allocator
David Rhodus posted on gobsd.com about the new mbuf allocation scheme. I don’t have any benchmarks to quantify the difference, unfortunately.
Google Summer of Code and BSD
Google is running a project called “Summer of Code” where students on summer break can write open-source code and get paid for it. Applications are closed at this point. FreeBSD and NetBSD are participating, along with a host of other excellent organizations. Hubert Feyrer’s blog has some details on the process so far.
DragonFly isn’t participating directly, but if you were itching for something to do, there’s projects available.
Different way to poll
Matthew Dillon changed the way network card polling works; follow the thread for much discussion on implementation. This happened back at the end of May.
UNIXReview roundup
I’ll play catchup on all the interesting UNIXReview articles that have gone by:
- Cleaning Up Large Mailing Lists: Removing Bad Addresses (a perennial issue)
– Shell Corner: DVD-RAM Daily Backup (handy!)
- Book reviews:
Mapping Security : The Corporate Security Sourcebook for Today’s Global Economy
Classic Shell Scripting (A tortoise on the cover – good symbolism)
Network Security
Buffer Overflow Attacks: Detect, Exploit, Prevent
06/13/2005
Resurrected
I’m all moved, or at least I have all my possessions boxed up in one house. I’ve got a partial network going, so I will attempt to get caught up on all the DragonFly news that happened recently, though it will take a few days.
I have additional electrical work that needs to be done in my house, so shiningsilence.com may have the occasional outage in the next week or two – I don’t anticipate it being for more than a few hours at a time, however.
06/01/2005
Going out
shiningsilence.com is moving tomorrow from one physical location to a new one – it’s just a few miles, but it means an outage. The domain will probably go down tonight when I package up hardware, and should hopefully return over the next few days as my new link is installed and DNS updates.
