Matthew Dillon’s commited a large quantity of bug fixes back to the 1.4 release tag today, and if no problems arise, 1.4.2 will be released.

William Grim is proposing to use DragonFly in his master’s thesis, where he writes a framework for user-space device drivers. Matthew Dillon and Emiel Kollof had some interesting feedback.

For those who like their console a little more roomy, vidcontrol is a way to fit smaller/different text onto your console screen immediately on startup. Attention to >font and LCD use is a good idea.

Curious about where to place rc scripts from pkgsrc? Joerg Sonneberger says where to stick them.

There’s a new mailing list – pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org – specifically for people using pkgsrc packages. tech-pkg@netbsd.org is now for packagers. To subscribe, send ‘subscribe pkgsrc-users’ to majordomo@netbsd.org.

Pkgsrc questions should generally go to this new list, though DragonFly-specific questions should be asked on users@dragonflybsd.org first. (Unless, of course, the package doesn’t build yet on DragonFly.)

Interestingly, the number of actual broken pkgsrc packages is down to only 10% of the entire collection. Much credit is due to Joerg Sonnenberger, Jeremy C. Reed, and others, for knocking this quantity down.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a patch that provides a new binary kgdb along with other features, and he needs testers before it gets committed.

Greg Lehey’s big book, “The Complete FreeBSD”, is now available as a PDF and as a set of source files under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can download, update, and submit back changes. This was the first book ever on FreeBSD, and it’s a big ‘un.

Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich are giving a talk at BSDCan about various firewalling technologies on BSD systems, including DragonFly.

I’m going to try to make it to this event, too…

Chuck Tuffli is working on an implementation of MSI for DragonFly. MSI is a way for device drivers to talk, similar to but better than the old IRQ method. As Chuck kindly explained it to me, MSI and MSI-X are necessary for PCI-Express support.

UnixReview.com has two noow book reviews up: Pro Perl Debugging, which should have obvious uses, and Math You Can’t Use, for those who want to feel bad about copyright.

The 5th System Administration and Network Engineering Conference is being held in the Netherlands, May 15-19, 2006. Register before April 7th for a discount.

OnLAMP.com has an article up about bandwidth shaping using various tools; it should work on DragonFly…

Things have been quiet for the past few days, so there’s few posts here. Take a look at the NetBSD News Beat if you’re hungry for links. Also, BSDNews.com appears to have become a lot more busy lately (perhaps it’s more automated).

Since DragonFly has been diverging from the FreeBSD 4 model, and because NVIDIA no longer produces a FreeBSD 4 X11 driver, there is no 3D acceleration for NVIDIA chipset video cards under DragonFly. It’s frustrating, though there are efforts to deal with this.

Looking at the latest version of xorg, there is mention in a few places of 3D support for more recent ATI cards, though it’s not reflected in the radeon man page.

Strangely, this interview on the ACM Queue magazine site by Marshall Kirk McKusick of a former Enron sysadmin is quite informative on project planning with large groups. Amazingly, that is not a run-on sentence. (Thanks, Slashdot)

Stumbled into this: nmap‘s latest version has DragonFly support. It worked before, so I don’t know what changes are needed…

A little tip picked up from Liam Foy Adrian Nida on #dragonflybsd on EFNet: If you have a 16-bit UTF file, cat and less will read it with ^@ characters all through the file. The pkgsrc package converters/recode will allow cleanup like so:

cat file.utf16 | recode utf16..ascii > file.ascii

Update: Several people pointed out that iconv can do the same thing.

OpenSSH 4.3 has been released, and it’ll be in DragonFly soon, though some of the new features may or may not work well.

BSDNews.com has a whole slew of new articles, some of which have been linked here before. Rather than call each out individually, I’ll say go, look.

Oliver Fromme wrote a nice description of how he backs up material on disk, skipping some file types and only archiving changed files.

Joerg Sonnenberger has posted a patch for those who want to compile packages from pkgsrc that use libtool, as an interim measure. The new version that doesn’t have the aforementioned problems will be in the pksrc tree in the next day or two.

Matthew Dillon posted the first version of his BIO work, along with a lengthy technical explanation. He’s looking for testers that use different filesystems like vn, msdosfs, etc.

Adrian Michael Nida has created a patch from Andrew Atrens’ work that will allow a Atheros-based wireless card to work on the current release of DragonFly and use WPA. Andrew Atrens does have some corrections. If you have this hardware, please give it a whirl; as patches for this have been around for a while, and it would be nice to have it in the tree.

“walt” listed the kernel debugging tips found on the wiki, along with some additional tidbits.

Matthew Dillon is starting major work on the buffer cache, implementing BIO chaining in the current step. This involves touching a lot of files, so he asks that all developers avoid commiting kernel changes for the next few days.

Not that new, but new to me: The NetBSD News Beat, which appears to pick up news through RSS, including from this very site! Links within my posts vanish, unfortunately, as my XML feed doesn’t keep them.

Kevin L. Kane submitted a large number of malloc changes, taken from OpenBSD. Emil Mikulic has a linkexplanation of the changes, from OpenBSD.

Xorg 6.9 is now in the DragonFly binary pkgsrc archive, as noted recently by Joerg Sonnenberger.

Check the Xorg link above if you don’t know the difference between Xorg 6.9 and 7.0. The new features list mention DragonFly BSD support, along with some odd things like support of mice with more than 12 buttons.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert gave a little summary of how he uses vim and cscope to view (without leaving the editor) a definition of the current identifier, and so on. Beats having to browse a separate archive, and it works without having to go out to the network.

‘walt’ brought up the problem that if we use ZFS for DragonFly, we are reliant on a proprietary tool. Could Sun “take it away”, a favorite threat attributed to closed-source? No.