Matthew Dillon has a rather lengthy writeup of the needs of a filesystem in a clustered latent environment.  (i.e. DragonFly’s goal)

This wasn’t on DragonFly, but it can apply: a BSDNexus post detailed the benchmark differences between Win4BSD, VMWare, and native Windows.

Found on the web: WarpBSD, a “project to incorporate OS/2 support into FreeBSD”, though it sounds like the vkernel now makes DragonFly a better choice.

UnixReview.com has 2 new articles up: “Parsing Web Form Input in CGI Shell Scripts“, which deals with the crazy notion of shell scripts handling interactive web pages, and “New Year, More Security Challenges“, which covers some U.S. federal law changes for 2007 that require computer data as part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.

OnLAMP.com has a nice interview of the people behind PC-BSD, and details on their latest release.

Jeremy C. Reed is writing an article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel, and he had some comprehensive questions.  Matthew Dillon had some answers which make a good read.

An ongoing conversation about virtual kernels led to a description of just how virtual kernel and real kernel memory usage interacts; they are surprisingly well synchronized.

Matthew Dillon has synchronized Preview with the latest bleeding-edge code,  to match up with the large number of commits lately.

A minor update to 1.6 is out, to incorporate some recent backpatches.

OnLAMP.com has a new article up about using PF and spamd to kill spam.

The FreeBSD Laptop Compatibility List has been resurrected.  Much of what’s on that list will also apply to DragonFly, so keep it in mind for your next laptop purchase.  (Thanks, BSDNews)

Joerg Sonnenberger posted to pkgsrc-users@ how he’s coming along in transitioning Xorg from the monolithic version currently in pkgsrc to the new 7.x modular version. (Short version: not yet, but soon)

A number of news sites have linked to the recent European Commission study of the economics of free/open source software (PDF). Less known but also good: There’s an article up on the Harvard Business School ‘Working Knowledge‘ site titled “The Business of Free Software.”

jscan isn’t ready for prime time, but Steve O’Hara-Smith decided to try it for backups.  It sorta almost kinda works, though Matthew Dillon added some tips to show more info on how it’s working.

And for your daily vkernel news…  Virtual kernels now are secure by default, meaning no loading kernel modules and no writing to kernel memory.  This is disabled by a command line flag at virtual kernel start time.  Also, Matthew Dillon realized that the virtual kernel automatically presents a safe way to cluster.

Matthew Dillon’s latest status report indicates he’s added asynchronous I/O to virtual kernels, for a significant speed boost. Also: the 1.8 branch is tomorrow, with release in two weeks as planned.

Now on UnixReview.com: Examining the Novell Certified Linux Professional 10 Certification, a review of the Komodo IDE (which I can’t get to work on DragonFly, darnit), and a book review of “Cisco Network Admission Control Volume II: NAC Framework Deployment and Troubleshooting“.

Matt Emmerton has ported a number of the *context calls to DragonFly; this should assist with building some 3rd-party software.  It has led to some discussion of syscalls and where they need to happen.  (Start at the most recent post and read back.)

Virtual kernels seems to be running stable; the branch for the 1.8 release will happen Tuesday after cleanup. While virtual kernels are primarily for development work, there’s other options.  (even more options)

Sepherosa Ziehau was able to get ping working between a virtual and real host, though Matthew Dillon had trouble with DHCP.  Matthew’s status report indicates floating-point works now and a buildworld  (a stress test if ever there was one) comes close to completing.

Jonathan Buschmann along with some other folks is taking on the porting of CARP to DragonFly, as a student project.  The idea has met with universal acclaim.

Sepherosa Ziehau has already managed to construct a virtual network connection to match virtual kernels, ridiculously quickly.

So, there’s a Gentoo/FreeBSD project, that attempts to graft the two systems together.  The lead developer in that project misread the old 4-clause BSD license on some older files, and paniced repeatedly.  (It even made it to the howling wasteland.)  Of course, the problem is not actually a problem – it’s caused by worry about a clause that was removed years ago.  Dru Lavigne has a nice writeup, and Wes Peters summed it up best in comments: “Now everybody get back to work. This is a 7-year-old nonissue…”

Matthew Dillon reports it is now possible to boot a virtual kernel and log in using that virtual system. The big remaining step (other than bugfixing) is a virtual network interface.

Matthew Dillon posted more and more about his vkernel progress, including build instructions.  Further discussion described the vkernel work as similar to User Mode Linux, with the potential for acceleration.

Matthew Dillon has posted a list of what remains on his virtual kernel work, along with the news that it can partially boot – see his post for the progress.  It should be ready shortly after the next release.  If you want to help, one of the needed things is a virtual network interface, perhaps similar to Qemu’s tap.

The Register has an interesting old story that describes (and links to more of the story) how Bill Joy put together vi.  (Thanks, duplicate postville)

There’s a preview of the upcoming KDE4 available; it may even work on DragonFly.  In any case, shiny pictures to look at. (Thanks Slashdot)

Jeremy C. Reed wrote in to announce a new book.  He’s created this wiki for the purpose of writing the “Quick Guide to BSD Administration”, which uses the BSDA Certification Requirements Document as a guideline.  There’s regularly generated PDFs to show progress.

From OpenCon 2006, a presentation on OpenBSD Culture.  I link to this in part because soft of the community ideas apply to DragonFly, and also because what makes up an open-source development group is rarely discussed beyond the code level. (Thanks Undeadly)

A few of the mirrors out there have DragonFly source available through rsync; Peter Avalos describes the correct command to retrieve it from theshell.com.  (Note: read that post for details before trying it yourself.)

One of the eternal chicken-and-egg problems is kernel modification.  Sometimes, a freshly installed system requires a different kernel, but you can’t download the source to build that new kernel until those changes are made.  However, kernel source will be included with the 1.8 release, so this should theoretically not be a problem.

Matthew Dillon posted a list of the various ways testing could be done over the next 4 weeks for the 1.8 release.  Help out, if you’ve got the inclination.

Matthew Dillon has announced that the next release will be branched in two weeks (Jan. 14th), with the 1.8 release scheduled for Jan. 28th.  Get stuff in/tested now if you want to be in 1.8!  He’s also updated his online diary with the extensive list of what’s gone in since 1.6.