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Matthew Dillon posted some details on how the problems of traffic were solved at BEST Internet using commodity hardware, which led into a discussion of zero-copy and also why a separate cgi-bin is good for speed.
EuroBSDCon is happening very soon. The early bird discount is ending in a few days, so sign up quickly. Attendance is planned to be in the triple digits.
BSDCan 2007 has been moved back a week because of a scheduling conflict with the hosting organization, the University of Ottowa.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a slew of new/revised drivers for testing: ural(4), rum(4), re(4), and sk(4). They are, I think, all network drivers. They are not yet committed, so please test if you have the right hardware.
OnLAMP.com has a 3-page interview with various OpenBSD developers about the features in the newest release. The interview goes into interesting detail, and for relevance, some of the newer wireless drivers in DragonFly came from this code work.
Matthew Dillon is making major changes to the namecache over the next 24 hours or so; watch out until it stabilizes. These changes should make nullfs mounting more memory-efficient, among other things, and lays a foundation for union or shadowing filesystems.
Sam Smith is looking for DragonFly developers who live in the UK and would be willing to present to the UKUUG Large Installation System Administration conference next spring.
Matthew Dillon has some comments on ssh, passwords, and security.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has managed to create a patch which, among other aspects of Linux binary support, allows the Linux Flash to work.
Firefox 2.0 has been released. If you’re looking to install it from pkgsrc, Geert Hendrickx is planning to create a separate package in pkgsrc, so that Firefox 1.5 can remain supported. Check www/firefox2 (may not exist yet; used to be wip/firefox2) for the new version.
The news may be slow, but at least it’s in-depth at OnLAMP/BSD. In addition to recently interviewing a disgruntled NetBSD committer, they’ve interviewed Kris Moore from PC-BSD and Matt Olander of iXsystems about their recent company merger/purchase.
Matthew Dillon wrote up a short bit on SMP hardware support, and how it needs to improve. Aso, as part of virtual kernel support, he committed the potential future ability to compile kernels on non-native architectures, i.e. cross-compilation, which can be handy.
Matthew Dillon has reorganized the /usr/src/sys/ topology. Kernel config files will still work as before, though they’ve moved, for different architectures, once those architectures are actually supported. Changes are already in.
Sepherosa Ziehau has improved transmission speed for 802.11x networking under adverse conditions. In other words, faster wireless. See the post for the technical terminology.
Matthew Dillon talked a little bit about serial ports, their uses, and their problems.
The Call for Papers for AsiaBSDCon 2007 is out. There should be some DragonFly developers there, too. Last year’s event was reportedly quite fun. (Thanks, BSDNews)
Matthw Dillon recently outlined the three major steps in his virtual kernel programming; the first step was done. The second now appears to be in progress, if not complete.
This week on UnixReview: a program review of ‘Snort 2.6 and Afterglow‘, a book review of ‘BigNum Math‘, which may be good for causing naps, and ‘Sharing A Linux Scanner On Your Network‘. Don’t let that last title fool you – that’s more about the available-for-BSD SANE.
The binary driver (“blob”) for NVIDIA video cards contained, until recently, a remote root exploit. Maybe those anti-binary people aren’t completely crazy. (Thanks, Undeadly)
I’ve moved to HiddenNetwork for the sidebar ad. HiddenNetwork provides ads for computer jobs, which I’d bet would interest most of the Digest’s readers. Some of them look tempting to me, in fact.
I originally heard of HiddenNetwork from reading The Daily WTF, and then had a followup recommendation (good idea, Simon). Please let me know your opinion by comment or email.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s port of FreeBSD-6′s sound infrastructure (including the HDA driver) is available. See his post for more details. It’s an easy install, requiring a simple patch and kernel or module build.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert suggests two projects available for a taker: updating Radeon DRM support, or updating the linux syscall support, both of which have existing code from which to start.
In the news recently:
Advisory Check 1.0 was released, which checks for vulnerabilities in installed software, and works with an impressive number of package managment systems on BSD and Linux. It includes pkgsrc, so it should work on DragonFly. (Thanks, BSDNews)
PC-BSD, a ‘with-its-desktop-and-package-manager’ version of FreeBSD, was bought by iXsystems. Reading this interview, it seems ‘bought’ == hiring of the main developer of PC-BSD by iXsystems. The lucky guy gets to be paid for what he used to do for fun.
pfSense, a FreeBSD-based firewall derived from m0n0wall, has reached version 1.0. One of the project leads on pfSense is Scott Ullrich, who also commits to DragonFly. pfSense uses the BSD Installer (again, Scott Ullrich is involved in that) as does DragonFly.
For those of you who run Preview, the tag is about to be slipped up to synchronize with the beeding edge code, as it’s been running pretty stable recently.
If you aren’t sure what Preview is, see “Is there a branch oriented towards stability?” on the FAQ.
Anthony L. Bryan has created a ‘metalink‘ for the DragonFly 1.6 ISO.  See his message for more details on the format.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has brought over FreeBSD’s high definition audio support, making it possible to get sound from ICH8 chipsets, for instance. It’s not yet committed; contact corecode if you want to try it out.
(No mailing list post yet; he announced this on the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
Jeremy C. Reed interviewed a number of folks using pkgsrc on non-NetBSD platforms, and put the results together on a webpage at bsdnewsletter.com. (DragonFly is represented by your humble Digest writer.)
Vector image files of the DragonFly logo are now available, which can produce much better versions of the image, especially at higher resolutions.
fsck(8) in DragonFly now can handle filesystems containing millions of directories. Matthew Dillon added this support because he happens to have 23 million directories laying around on a single volume.
YONETANI Tomokazu has added support for disk suspension for saving power.
A discussion on users@ has wandered into just how much of any data transmission is overhead; e.g. not data.
Hubert Feyrer has an interesting post showing some of the many places BSD (often NetBSD, in his search) code can be found, which is probably in no small part due to the BSD license.
DragonFly 1.6.2 is released, along with 1.4.5, to include the recent changes that had been merged back to the branches. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert moved the release up, and a changelog is available for 1.4 and 1.6. (changelogs are in forward chronological order, so skim down.)
Updating pkgsrc is usually done through cvs, though it is apparently also now possible using Mercurial. (Thanks HubertF)
csup is usable for a cvsup client, and since it’s written in C, doesn’t require modula-3, which doesn’t build on DragonFly. csup was broken on DragonFly, though YONETANI Tomokazu has a fix. Of course, the server side still needs to be compiled, with the same dependency problems. Alternatives like cvsync have problems, and rsync is supposed to be too taxing, but now is a good time to test that assumption, perhaps with a benchmark?
Dru Lavigne has a new article on OnLAMP.com describing how to fine-tune your firewall, assuming your firewall is IPFW.
Markus Schatzl happened to (re)post a link to a DragonFly installation guide he wrote that includes mention of the Smart Bootmanager, which can allow booting from the DragonFly install CD even on systems that don’t allow for CD booting. I may have posted this before, but it’s worth repeating.
The BSDStats.org statistics script is now in DragonFly. It’s not enabled by default; the following two lines in /etc/periodic.conf are needed to activate it.
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
monthly_statistics_report_devices="YES"
A wierd bug in bmake, pkgsrc (and NetBSD’s) version of make, would occasionally make it difficult to kill a make process with a Ctrl-C. Matthew Dillon found the bug, a fix for it, and a suggested fix for NetBSD, too.
There’s a new version (4.0) of the BSDStats program out. Hubert Feyrer has recently suggested some changes on his blog, which should make it into the next version. Those changes may or may not apply to DragonFly, since there’s several elements of DragonFly that originated with NetBSD.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc is out, and here’s the announcement. Start your somewhat difficult upgrade process now!
