If you use the OpenLDAP package(s) in pkgsrc, it’s undergone some changes that affect it and its dependencies.
Month: May 2006
Extra projects possible
If you’re looking for some extra small programming work, Matthew Dillon suggests teaching inetd to bind to one interface like in OpenBSD, or allowing userspace threads to pick a CPU on which to run.
Wiki new and returning at the same time
wiki.dragonflybsd.org is now pointing at a new site hosted by fortunaty.net. It also includes this new Device HOWTO by Thomas Schlesinger.
One less way to goof up
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added a change that makes cvs ask for confirmation before using a filename when adding a commit message.
05/29/2006
Watch out for SMP
As Matthew Dillon posted, SMP builds may be broken for the next few days, so rebuild with caution.
05/28/2006
Head spinning
Matthew Dillon warned that he is committing a lot of work on multiprocessor support over the next few days; if you are one of the people who run bleeding-edge versions of DragonFly (1.5 from CVS, or ‘HEAD’), there will probably be some instability. It’s not called bleeding-edge for nothing…
BSDCertification: 2005
BSDCertification.org has released their report for 2005. The link is to a press release; the actual report is a PDF. (Thanks, BSDNews.)
SoC project: pkg_install
The different Summer of Code projects for NetBSD have been posted. Since pkgsrc and NetBSD are still pretty intertwined, there’s pkgsrc-related work in there, and one of them is an improvement of pkg_install, by DragonFly developer (and package-building pro) Joerg Sonnenberger.
Packaging, packaging, packaging
Something I haven’t seen in a new article recently: a comparison of FreeBSD ports, NetBSD (and DragonFly, and others) pkgsrc, and OpenBSD ports. A light article, as these often tend to be. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer.)
Legal rights
Not directly DragonFly related, but still good to know of: One of Apple’s lawsuits was tossed. The right to post early details about consumer products is not that important, but the ability of the press to report truthful details without ‘revenge‘ is important.
05/24/2006
I like Live CDs
Hubert Feyrer posted links to a BSDCan 2006 talk on BSD Live CDs, a subject near and dear to my heart. (I’d like to see a DragonFly Live CD that included X and a variety of applications, like PC-BSD or Desktop BSD.)
05/22/2006
Better thrashing
BSD memory management systems are legendary for handling stress well; however, there’s a limit on how much paging can happen and still have a responsive system. Matthew Dillon has put in a possible improvment for low-memory solutions.
05/21/2006
rtw(4) testing
Sepherosa Ziehau has his version of the rtw(4) driver available for testing. This is taken fromt he NetBSD driver, and is used in newer wireless cards.
Spinlocks spinlocks spinlocks
Matthew Dillon has found that an extended form of spinlock is useful for the MP goals he has to do before continuing his VFS work.
05/20/2006
ibcs2 and svr4 go poof
Matthew Dillon has removed support for ibcs2 and svr4 emulation. It hasn’t been touched in 10 years… Are there even binaries that still require that anymore?
05/19/2006
Frustration leads to changes
Matthew Dillon has revamped the system include files in DragonFly, so now including the correct files is much simpler.
05/18/2006
Source: 802.11, LWKT changes
There were a number of interesting commits today: Sepherosa Ziehau’s new 802.11 framework, taken in part from FreeBSD 6, is now committed, and he’s also updated the man pages to match. (minor yet very important!) His ath(4) driver will be following soon. Also, Matthew Dillon has moved the LWKT from a token system to spinlocks – see the commit message for details. Finally, there are some side benefits for DragonFly from the Coverity scan of FreeBSD.
05/17/2006
MP before VFS
Matthew Dillon found some problems in his ongoing vnode work. Apparently, the way to solve them is to make other portions of the code multiprocessor safe.
UnixReview.com: same again
This week, on UnixReview.com: the book reviews of “Extrusion Detection: Security Monitoring for Internal Intrusions” and “Linux Patch Management“, and more on security certification.
Blob avoidance
If you’re concerned about (or involved in) device documentation, there’s a new wiki site called Vendor Watch, which lists the state of efforts to get different hardware vendors to document their hardware in a way that makes it usable for open source efforts.
05/16/2006
Certification logo and competition
BSDCertification.org has a new logo and a new competition where the best fundraising idea from a user group gets a prize (passes to BSDCan 2007). June 10th is the cutoff for registering your group. (thanks, BSDNews)
More talk on BSDTalk
I missed this before: BSDTalk has an interview with Scott Ullrich, who has worked on DragonFly and the BSD Installer, among other things. There’s lots of other recent interviews, too.
pkgsrc 2006 DragonFly presentation
Joerg Sonnenberger presented at PkgSrcCon 2006 about his experiences bringing pkgsrc to DragonFly. The slides from his presentation are available now, along with all the others.
05/15/2006
Wiki down
wiki.dragonflybsd.org is down, along with gobsd.com. The wiki was on a separate server from the rest of dragonflybsd.org, so the rest of the domain is fine, but there’s currently no details on when the wiki will be running again, as the hosting company has apparently taken the server offline.
Java in pkgsrc soon?
Because of recent changes to the Java licensing scheme, it’s now possible to include Java as part of a packaging system. It’s available now for pkgsrc, for some versions of NetBSD. Other pkgsrc platforms (like DragonFly) will probably follow suit.
05/14/2006
And even more clustering
Matthew Dillon’s starting/continuing work on that aforementioned clustering by breaking out the journaling protocols into a module he’s calling “SYSLINK“.
05/12/2006
Hate reading? Read summaries!
Matthew Dillon, while following up on comments on his recent clustering post, managed to summarize the whole thing in much less space.
05/11/2006
Clustering on the horizon
Matthew Dillon’s decided to use the journaling work that was done previously on DragonFly to handle communication between the kernel and a VFS, and also between machines in a cluster. He typed up a very detailed explanation that shows where a lot of the groundwork has been done. (Plus, a followup.)
05/10/2006
UnixReview.com: Nutshells, con
This week on UnixReview.com: Reviews of Unix in a Nutshell, C in a Nutshell, SQL in a Nutshell, and a description of the LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld Conference.
DesktopBSD tools here too?
Marcin Jessa pointed out that since it’s possible to compile the DesktopBSD tools on FreeBSD, it may also be possible on DragonFly.
KMixer mixes again
‘walt’ has an patch for kdemultimedia that may make KMix, the KDE mixer, work on DragonFly. It’ll be in the pkgsrc binary soon.
05/09/2006
Rough ESTimate
Johannes Hofmann has made available a “crude” port of EST, a utility for Pentium M speed control, for DragonFly.
How to stop
Some trivia about shutting down your DragonFly system: ‘shutdown -p now’ is the preferred way, though the rare laptop needs some tweaks. It’s also possible to get KDE to issue the command. While on the topic of power management, YONETANI Tomokazu is planning to update ACPI in the next month.
New POSIX locks
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the POSIX locking code, and included a small test utility.
05/07/2006
SoC: pkg_install
One of the proposed projects for Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is a rewrite of pkg_install, which encompasses the various utility programs used for pkgsrc. The proposal is by Joerg Sonnenberger, who has commit access to both DragonFly and pkgsrc, and has made an astounding quantity of packages work on DragonFly.
05/06/2006
Kernel option cruft removal
Sascha Wildner’s removing a whole lot of kernel options. Speak up if you are using them… though if you are, they probably don’t work.
05/05/2006
devfs quickly
Anyone want to write a new devfs? (That’s device file system, if you haven’t seen the term before.) A discussion about tracking disks and their appropriate mount points ended with Matthew Dillon noting that at this point, the DragonFly system is cleaned up enough that this would be an approachable task for someone with experience.
UnixReview.com: Security+, frameworks
This week on UnixReview.com: Security+ test review, plus examples, and a look at CherryPy, a Python framework. (Programming frameworks are all the rage lately, what with Ruby on Rails defining an otherwise nearly-unused language.)
05/02/2006
AMD CPU issue fixed
Matthew Dillon has added the fix for the recent disclosure issue on AMD CPUs, described (for FreeBSD) in FreeBSD-SA-06:14.fpu.
05/01/2006
ZFS for everyone
DragonFly is (one of?) the first to plan for ZFS, but it appears another BSD – Mac OS X – may also take it up. More information is (unsurprisingly) on the Wikipedia ZFS entry. Gee, it’d be nice to have ZFS across all BSD platforms, wouldn’t it?