BSDNews has an interesting link to a Inquirer article benchmarking the new Intel processors. While it does wander into excessive acronyms, it’s interesting that the benchmarking is done using a variety of BSDs.
Month: November 2006
11/29/2006
ACPI up for testing
YONETANI Tomokazu has a patch to update to the latest version of ACPI. Please test, if you’re running bleeding edge code, and especially if you have a laptop.
11/28/2006
To do at 23C3
Are you going to the 23C3 (23rd Chaos Communication Congress) conference at the end of 2006? If so, there’s an informal DragonFly Hackathon planned, as a number of DragonFly developers will be there. There’s a list of potential tasks on the wiki.
Preview moved up, next release soon
Matthew Dillon reported that DragonFly Preview code (version 1.7) have been synchronized with the bleeding-edge code, as it’s been stable. Also, the 1.8 release is definitely scheduled for January, at which point he plans to have “at least a basic userland kernel binary”.
Another stability report
‘nega’ reports a DragonFly 1.4 has gone for most of a year without issue; good news for an operating system undergoing heavy surgery.
BSD in Italy
A fellow named Trismegistos is interested in creating an Italian BSD community; if you’re interested, contact him at tr1sm3g1st0s@gmail.com.
11/27/2006
Hooray for mailing list arguments
Something less obvious about the open source model (and, of course, the DragonFly project) is the relatively egalitarian playing field for anyone who wants to contribute. The worst thing that can happen is a rude email. Via Slashdot comes the story of how a simple menu was too long and still
wrong.
11/26/2006
Better performance
Mike Tancsa is doing some throughput testing on different versions of FreeBSD, Linux, and DragonFly. DragonFly does relatively well for a system in the middle of a dramatic change.
11/25/2006
Cleanup everywhere
The new site look has been extended to wiki.dragonflybsd.org, the CVSWeb output, and the mail archive. Also, usage of the bug tracker has increased lately, with a significant reduction in the number of outstanding bugs. If you do happen to have any pending bugs reports on the tracker (which includes posts to the bugs@ mailing list), please update or close them.
11/22/2006
DragonFly on VMWare
A mysterious user posted a link to the VMWare site, where you can find a DragonFly 1.6.2 VMWare image with some preloaded software. It’s entertainingly called ‘DAMP’, for ‘DragonFly + Apache + MySQL + Postgres/PHP’.
11/21/2006
Light reading for the holidays
Erik Wikström and Sascha Wildner have some reading recommendations for those interested in programming for operating systems.
January release, as before
The next release is planned for January. Incidentally, one of the changes mentioned in that linked message is available now as a patch, for testing.
11/20/2006
bsdtalk, now with pkgsrc
The latest bsdtalk (which I mention far less than I should) has a talk with pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam.
Sharing BSDs
As Armin Arh found out recently, FreeBSD uses UFS2, which can’t be read by DragonFly. If you want to install FreeBSD and DragonFly on a system, and share drives, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a strategy.
11/18/2006
Seen on tech-pkg@…
Recently on the pkgsrc tech-pkg list, Roland Illig posted the developer-oriented “How to get help with pkgsrc / pkgsrc documentation“, and Alistair Crooks posted “Changes to the Packages Collection in October 2006“.
NULLFS vastly improved
Matthew Dillon pointed out, with examples, that DragonFly’s NULLFS (in bleeding edge code) is now flexible to the point where you can remount arbitrary locations in your filesystem anywhere you want, which is very handy for chroot(8) or jail(8).
Faster SCSI, new objcache to test
Gary Stanley (‘Ancient’ on #dragonflybsd) has posted a patch against the most recent DragonFly sources that adds SCSI domain validation. It ought to work on older releases, too.
The name isn’t exciting, but SCSI domain validation ensures your SCSI bus runs as fast as possible. If you have the hardware for it, try it out.
Also, if you’re in a testing mood, Matthew Dillon has posted a new version of kern_objcache.c, using spinlocks instead of tokens, coming from a longer conversation detailing locking models in DragonFly.
Bug not a bug
It’s been reported that most every flavor of BSD (including DragonFly) has a FireWire bug allowing a local user to dump all system memory by passing a negative value to an ioctl. This is reported as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs, though that project’s web page doesn’t list it.
Joerg Sonnenberger pointed out that it isn’t a problem on i386 systems, as copyout checks that the argument doesn’t intrude into userland or beyond address space.
11/16/2006
stge(4) support
Porting/coding machine Sepherosa Ziehau has added stge(4) support, which works with a number of gigabit ethernet cards.
Which binary pkgsrc version to use
As Joerg Sonnenberger recently described, his ‘stable‘ group of binary pkgsrc packages comes from the regular pkgsrc quarterly releases, and the ‘current‘ batch comes from whatever is in pkgsrc at the time of the build. Stick with ‘stable’ for the most dependable results.
11/15/2006
EuroBSDCon 2006 papers, presentations
Joerg Sonnenberger’s presentation and paper (PDF) about pkgsrc, from EuroBSDCon 2006, is available (See abstract). Jeffrey Hsu, another DragonFly developer, also gave two presentations.
11/14/2006
No, not yet
The virtual kernel work Matthew Dillon is doing will help support architectures other than x86 someday, but the work isn’t complete yet.
I post this in part because I see people ask “Does DragonFly support the AMD64?” relatively often. There’s also other platforms that are becoming more common (ARM) or less (PowerPC) that would be nice to support.
Of course, AMD64 is a relative term, since it certainly works on AMD64 – you’re reading this web page served from such a system now.
Pile of hardware updates
Today brought a number of commits for support of disk controllers and various networking chipsets.
11/13/2006
EuroBSDCon 2007 call for papers
The call for papers (check the list of people’s titles at the end of that document) has gone out for EuroBSDCon 2007.
Much faster testing
From Sascha Wildner in #dragonflybsd: when you’re rebuilding parts of the world, use wmake instead of buildworld; the correct environment will be used, but the build will go much faster.
Slight downtime, already done
A combination of software upgrades and me changing my apache config on shiningsilence.com led to some unplanned downtime this weekend – sorry!
11/12/2006
More on the reorg
Matthew Dillon expounded a bit on the reasoning and method behind his kernel file reorganization.
11/11/2006
NFS ports for posterity
Out of a conversation on users@, Oliver Fromme gave a list of the ports used by NFS. Someday, you may be on the other side of a firewall wondering what those ports are…
11/10/2006
Green bug boring
‘walt’ gave some details on configuring X to use DMPS, so that your monitor turns off when your console is inactive for extended periods. Good for conservation, but not as fun as the alternative.
11/09/2006
lukemftpd gone; note the d
lukemftpd (the ftp server nowadays known as tnftpd) was removed from the base DragonFly system by Perter Avalos. It wasn’t built by default, and it’s still available in pkgsrc if you need it. Note that the server version was removed, but the client version, lukemftp (also now known as tnftp) has been updated.
11/06/2006
NYCBSDCon06 journal
Will Backman wrote a journal of his experiences at the recent NYCBSDCon. (Thanks, Undeadly)
Cleaning years of cruft
Matthew Dillon is planning major cleanup in the kernel files, in part because it’s been historically inconsistent, and in part to support virtual kernels. The part that will affect most people is a new location for the kernel config file, and ‘i386′ is now the more relevant ‘pc32′. (or maybe not. I’ll post when it’s defined.)
New template for commits
Matthew Dillon has committed a change that adds new lines to the template when committing to DragonFly; most notably, it includes a line for a link back to the appropriate issue on the DragonFly bug tracker.
11/03/2006
Leaf falls in autumn
leaf.dragonflybsd.org, which hosts the mail archive and developer accounts, has a dead power supply. The drive has been moved to a slower backup machine, so it’s still reachable until the original is resurrected.
stge(4) driver for testing
Sepherosa Ziehau has a test version of the FreeBSD stge(4) driver ported to DragonFly, which supports a good number of gigabit networking devices. Please test and give feedback.
11/02/2006
“Dying” slides online
Seen several places: Jason Dixon’s humorous “BSD is dying” talk from NYCBSDCon06 is available with audio and slides online on Google Video and in other formats from his site.
Another reason for BSD
An oft-touted benefit of the GNU Public License is that it forces organizations that use GPL code to republish their changes, so that improvements to open code can be shared. That sounds good, in principle.
According to Harald Welte, founder of the gpl-violations.org project, this clause in the GPL has never resulted in any useful code ever being returned to the community. (Thanks, HubertF)
11/01/2006
New old awk
Even though it’s been around forever, awk is still being updated, and Peter Avalos has added the latest version to DragonFly. Notice that it is the One True Awk, not GNU awk.
USENIX 2007 call for papers
The call is out for papers for the 2007 USENIX Tech conference. Submissions are due by January 9th, 2007.
UnixReview.com: Tile, CCNP, and CCNP
This week on UnixReview.com: a writeup on Tile, a new GUI toolkit for Tcl, “Exploring the CCNP Certification“, and “Test Your Knowledge of CCNP Topics“