Chris Csandy offers these helpful tips on how to build a bridge.

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.dragonflybsd.org is now pointing at a new site hosted by fortunaty.net. It also includes this new Device HOWTO by Thomas Schlesinger.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added a change that makes cvs ask for confirmation before using a filename when adding a commit message.

As Matthew Dillon posted, SMP builds may be broken for the next few days, so rebuild with caution.

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.org has released their report for 2005.  The link is to a press release; the actual report is a PDF.  (Thanks, BSDNews.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.)

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.

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.

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.

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?

Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for a number of network drivers, including vge(4) and ral(4).

Matthew Dillon has revamped the system include files in DragonFly, so now including the correct files is much simpler.

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.

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.