It’s a week with variety on UnixReview.com: “More Forensic Tools“, a Shell Corner article: “Littera Delenda Est“, a Regular Expressions article: “Good Works with Real Databases“, and a product review: “Examining SlickEdit 2007: Code Quick | Think Slick“
Month: May 2007
bce(4)’s better
How good is Sepherosa Ziehau? The bce(4) driver is broken with polling in FreeBSD, but he’s made the DragonFly version work just fine.
Faster, newer pf
Apparently pf has some significant speedups; updating the DragonFly version would have a nice benefit at this point. (seen on Undeadly and by _hasso_ on #dragonflybsd)
The many ways to upgrade pkgsrc
Julio M. Merino Vidal, a pkgsrc developer, has a writeup on his blog about some different ways to upgrade pkgsrc, along with a link to the definitive source. (seen on NetBSD News Beat)
Vkernel rebootable
Matthew Dillon has changed virtual kernels so that they can be internally restarted or shut down, just like a real system. OMG.
Disklabel methodology
Matthew Dillon wrote up an explanation of how his disklabel changes work out.
Broadcom NetXtreme II cards support
Broadcom NetXtreme II GigE network cards are now supported on DragonFly, thanks to an excellent interaction between developer, users, and Broadcom.
Flash, with and without Linux emulation
This is interesting: Getting Flash to work on FreeBSD without Linux compatibility. It may apply to other BSDs – otherwise untested. (Thanks, BSDNews) If you want to do it with the Linux compatibility options, that’s documented on the wiki.
Down on Agile
While not DragonFly specific, I think this Worse Than Failure article about what’s wrong with Agile development is interesting for its main point: strategy is not a replacement for skill.
Virtual kernels now can boot from ISO
In an effort to make testing of a new installer easier, Matthew Dillon added support for having a virtual kernel boot from a CD image. It works, though you can’t quite run an installer on it yet.
UnixReview.com: MySQL certification, and books
It’s a sparse week on UnixReview.com: Examining MySQL Certification, book reviews of “FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook“, and “PC Technician Street Smarts“. If you’re curious to know, FISMA stands for “Federal Information Security Management Act”, which means it’s probably only of interest to U.S. readers or people who enjoy bureaucratic paperwork.
pkgsrcCon 2007 slides
Hubert Feyrer noticed that slides are up for all the pkgsrcCon 2007 presentations.
Leaf cleaning
I’m going to be cleaning leaf.dragonflybsd.org – watch out! This should not affect services located there, like developer accounts or the mail archive. I hope.
A vkernel Peek on dragonflybsd.org
Aggelos Economopoulos’s lwn.net articles titled “A Peek at the DragonFly Virtual Kernel” are now available as a single item on dragonflybsd.org, with some additional details that didn’t appear in the initial version.
wiki -> RSS -> email?
Gergo Szakal suggested using FeedBurner to put recent wiki changes onto the doc@ mailing list. I think it would work well to make sure major changes get discussed – opinions?
More disklabel work
Matthew Dillon has done some careful reworking of the disklabel system; it will require a full make buildworld and etc. process if you are running bleeding edge code and want to upgrade. Be careful!
Incidentally, this makes a dynamic /dev possible, for anyone wanting to put it together.  Again, be careful!
UnixReview: PHP quiz, Apache and C books, and Up.Time
UnixReview.com has 4 new items this week: A liitle quiz titled “Test Your Knowledge of PHP“, book reviews of “Apache Phrasebook” and “Beginning C: From Novice to Professional“, and a review of Up.Time 4.
CCD changes require full rebuild
If you are running bleeding edge DragonFly, make sure your next buildworld/buildkernel is a full one. Matthew Dillon has made changes to ccdconfig/vnconfig that require it.
Parallel bulk builds for pkgsrc
Joerg Sonnenberger has posted his initial plans for making bulk build of pkgsrc run in parallel.
Heads up: disklabel work
Since Matthew Dillon’s working on the disklabel code, be careful if you’re running bleeding edge code in the next few days. Disklabel errors eat data.
AMD64 support for 2.0?
Matthew Dillon was considering completing AMD64 support for the next release, and it looks like he might be starting on it.
 Update: No, that’s disklabel work. Thanks to ‘anonymous’ for indirectly pointing that out.
Minor sysctl changes
kern.ipc.nmbufs and kern.ipc.nmbclusters sysctl variables are now read-only, and can only be set at boot. Previously, changing them on a running system would show changed values in any application that reported them, but it wouldn’t actually take effect. If you don’t already change these values, this won’t affect you.
pkgsrc renaming for FireFox, Thunderbird
The pkgsrc packages for FireFox and Thunderbird are going through a minor shuffle, to make naming consistent with the latest versions of each. Watch for this on your next upgrade.
Using GCC 4
If you wanted to use GCC4 instead of the current default of GCC3, on DragonFly, check this description by Matthew Dillon of the proper environment variables to change.
Support policy explained
Matthew Dillon laid out his support policy for DragonFly, which boils down to: current release and the previous one.
IPv6 routing bug: Update now
If you have a DragonFly system, you should update it now. (Point releases have been rolled for 1.8, 1.6, and even 1.4) Non-DragonFly systems should also be updated, if available.
More C99 suggestions
Hasso Tepper pointed at this interesting page of DragonFly C99 projects that I no doubt linked to long ago and then forgot.
Possible projects: libm and C99, new wpi(4)
Chris Turner posted a nice summary of work that would be needed for C99 compatibility in libm. Sepherosa Ziehau also posted a short guide on how to create new drivers for wpi(4), as the existing drivers (in any BSD) are not up to snuff.
Note: I noticed again while writing this: developerWorks is neat.
Mirroring changes
If you are mirroring Joerg Sonnenberger’s pkgsrc binary archive from its old location at packages.stura.uni-rostock.de, it’s time to switch. He has a new site, and until his bandwidth has stabilized, it’s best to mirror from Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s site at chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de.
More Type 0 routing fixes
Hasso Tepper passed along word that he has added a more permanent fix for the IPv6 ‘Type 0 routing header‘ bug. The fix has been brought to DragonFly 1.8, 1.6, and 1.4, too.
More 802.11 encryption
Sepherosa Ziehau has commited encryption support for 802.11 cards that aren’t ath(4). The commit message goes into far more detail than I can sum up (or understand).
DragonFly in Dutch Linux Magazine
Douwe Kiela passed along word that he authored an article on DragonFly BSD’s clustering goals for the Dutch ‘Linux Magazine‘, in their “BSD Corner”.
Big commit this Sunday
Matthew Dillon will be committing his integration of SYSREF and struct vnode this Sunday, 2007/05/06. A side effect of this is dynamic allocation and unallocation of vnodes.
ONLamp.com: OpenBSD 4.1
In a rare update, OnLAMP.com has a new article: all about the latest release of OpenBSD.
bge(4) patch to test
Sepherosa Ziehau has an update for newer bge(4) devices; grab the patch and test if that’s your network driver.
An interesting combination
Noticed on the FreeTDS mailing list: the Coverity open source scan, like DragonFly, is using pkgsrc to build software.
Update: “”Building Development Code from pkgsrc” was the presentation at the recent pkgsrcCon that described this, though the abstract does not mention it. Slides may be available soon. (Thanks, Joerg)
The rolling-replace trick
If you wanted to rebuild all your already-installed pkgsrc software, this post on pkgsrc-users@ describes the way to do it using pkg_rolling-replace. This can be useful if you want to try a new threading library, for instance.
Generic benchmarks go well
‘Haidut’ benchmarked several different systems using a vanilla install, and posted the results at his website. (Scroll down) Interestingly, the DragonFly results are quite competitive, especially considering that it’s in a massive transition.