I’ve posted about it before, but the question returns: how does one install modular Xorg from pkgsrc when there’s no single meta-pkg for it?  Gergo Szakal links to some answers.

Matthew Dillon posted an update on how he’s organizing syslink to handle the sharing of machine resources in a cluster.

Aggelos Economopoulos’s second article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel is now available to non-subscribers on lwn.net. (The first article is also available.)

Welcome our newest committer: Hasso Tepper.  In addition to his recently committed patched for DragonFly, he’s also been working on KDE support for DragonFly.

rsync.net (which offers Backup Done Right, as far as I can tell) is offering a number of code bounties for various (mostly FreeBSD) projects.  One of them is a standardized stress test for UFS2 – a general filesystem testing framework would do everyone good - especially someone using a distributed file system…

There’s a variety of ways to turn on multiprocessing support in a kernel; Matthew Dillon recently explained the variety and reasoning.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has pointed out that pkg_rolling-replace is very helpful when recompiling to use a different threading library.

Do you have a bge(4) network card?  If so, Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to test his patch – it shouldn’t do anything but improve the card performance.

A very busy week on UnixReview.com: the oddly-titled Regular Expressions column “Tuple Spaces Help Organize Concurrency Solutions“, and Shell Corner’s “Perl Is a Gem: One-Liners and Programs“. There’s also an article called “The Joys of Data Classification“, along with book reviews of “UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition“, and “Backup and Recovery“.

The USENIX 2007 Technical Conference will be on June 17th-22nd of this year, and early bird registration is due June 1st.  There’s a number of ‘BSD People’ there, as speakers.

Apparently virtual kernels are useful no matter the operating system.  (Thanks, somebody I lost the name of on #dragonflybsd)

Thinking of moving to modular xorg since it’s in pkgsrc?  There’s no meta-package that lets you install all the needed packages at one time, but discussion in the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list gives a pretty complete list to read of packages and tips.

LWN.net has an article up on DragonFly’s vkernel system, and this looks to be the first of several articles.  (Thanks, Hasso Tepper in #dragonflybsd)

cvsup is an excellent program, allowing retrievals of file revisions from a cvsup server.  It’s been traditionally used in FreeBSD and DragonFly to get updates to the system source…  However, cvsup requires a working version of Modula-3 to build, and the C-based replacement, csup, can’t run as a server.  Rsync is a common alternative that also offers good performance.

I did a comparison of the two, repeatedly running partial and full downloads from a DragonFly mirror that supplied the same data via both protocols.  I posted the results, and dragonflybsd.org is now offering files via rsync.

Matthew Dillon posted a roundup on the status of his work on the SYSLINK protocol, and his plans for the new Hammer filesystem and Anvil storage system. He’s added a new ‘alist’ bitmap allocator to assist with this. I daresay he’s feeling a strong desire for a new filesystem about now, too…

There’s an oft-quoted Perlism: “There’s More Than One Way to Do It”.  Today’s example of that is the question: “How do you see what network ports are being used by a given application?“  Turns out there’s at least three different ways to find out.

On UnixReview.com: “Test Your Knowledge of Regular Expressions and Shell Basics“, a book review of “Scripting VMware Power Tools“, and a product review of Komodo 4.0.

pkgsrc now has the new modular version of xorg.  There isn’t yet a single meta-package to pull it all in as there was for monolithic xorg, but you can find the packages pretty easily by just looking at what Joerg Sonnenberger is working on.  If you want to build packages using this latest version, set ‘X11_VERSION=modular’ in your mk.conf file.  (Thanks to Joerg for cluing me in to this.)

Someone want to get DRI/DRM working?  NetBSD just started getting it together, and it would be handy to take advantage of some of the xorg features with it.

Mike Wolman posted some benchmarks using a virutal kernel, and Matthew Dillon followed up with an explanation on what affects speed in the virtual environment.

Matthew Dillon has written up some details of how he wants the syslink protocol to deal with a variety of situations, like asymmetrical bandwidth, or having to discover the network path when the state of the network is changing or broken.  I see some similarities with other successful protocols you may have heard of.

Steve O’Hara-Smith has managed to get nspluginwrapper working.  This program acts as a wrapper for FireFox plugins compiled for other platforms, most notably Flash.  The changes have been submitted (and already included!) upstream into pkgsrc, but you can get details from him now, if desired.

Rumko posted a kdebase patch to the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list.  This patch corrects kdebase to work with the recent 1:1 threading changes in DragonFly.

From an anonymous post: dragonfly clusters.