Matthew Dillon’s committed some initial support for streaming mirroring. With this, two disks can be synchronized over a network link of any speed or reliability – it can be restarted and immediately begin where it left off, and the amount of bandwidth used can be controlled. This sounds neat.
Month: July 2008
Permalinks fixed
Upgrading WordPress to 2.6 yesterday broke the direct links to articles on the Digest. It’ll be updated in the 2.6.1 release of WordPress, but until then I’ve changed the links to correct for the issue.
07/30/2008
What’s broken with pkgsrc
I really like pkgsrc. It’s a big system that works well for managing a huge variety of software packages, across multiple platforms, and it’s been beneficial to DragonFly for making a lot of programs instantly accessible.
The issue nobody’s fixed – yet – is that there are plenty of ways to upgrade, some of which don’t work (make update), or involved homegrown solutions that miss the goal most people have: the ability to say simply “Upgrade this” and have it work. This is why programs with the same functionality but simpler usage become popular.
(Prompted by a number of recent “How do I upgrade pkgsrc?” questions on DragonFly and pkgsrc mailing lists.)
ath9k driver released
Gergo Szakal noticed that there is now ath9k, an official open source driver for Atheros 802.11n wireless chipsets. (‘Sunnz’ pointed out it’s still not as open as people would like.)Â There is an existing community-built ath(4) driver.
Edit: Gergo Szakal pointed out ath(4) is 802.11b/g and ath9k is 802.11n, so it’s not a direct overlap. Thanks, Gergo.
A liitle less Lock in the network
Sepherosa Ziehau’s committed his ETHER_INPUT2 networking upgrades, which moves networking a bit closer to getting out from under the Giant Lock.
Hammer at the JRSL
Damian Vicino is presenting a 40-minute talk on Hammer at the “Jornada Regional de Software Libre” in Argentina, August 20-22.
07/29/2008
RFC3542 SoC project progress
Dashu Huang has posted a patchset and a link to his design document (PDF) for his work on RFC3542 support, which is one of the DragonFly Summer of Code projects.
More BSD license in base
Versions of DragonFly later than 2.0 now have bsdcpio, a BSD-licensed version of cpio, as the default version of cpio, instead of the GNU-licensed one. Thanks to Peter Avalos for adding it.
Cooperation gets us places
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for JMicron Gigabit/Fast Ethernet chipsets, apparently with the support of Ethanat JMicron and Pyun YongHyeon of FreeBSD.
07/28/2008
Tools that you should use yourself
Here’s another one of those Flash shakycam presentations: Danny O’Brien talking about Web 2.0 and personal info. I link to this because it’s interesting: lots of newer web sites like Flickr, LiveJournal, etc have absorbed people’s creativity. While that’s good, it’s dangerous in a way that’s been seen before. Having your own system with your own operating system (hint: DragonFly) lets you own your own data and interests. If you can get past some of the joking at the beginning, the video makes that point at some length. I post this not to make with the tinfoil hat attitude, but to point out that in some ways, handing your writing or art off to a remote hosting service makes as much sense as renting a paintbrush.
July OSBR: Accessibility
The Open Souce Business Resource for this month is about Accessibility. (via) This means
07/27/2008
BSDLVM?
Pedro F. Giffuni pointed out something interesting: a project to bring LVM to NetBSD. We could use this too.
07/26/2008
pkgsrc 2008Q2 is out
The most recent quarterly branch of pkgsrc is out. Read the release announcement for details of new changes, which include an improved Ruby Gems framework and Joerg’s work on DESTDIR (staged installs) support.
The binary packages on pkgbox for DragonFly were built with a prerelease version of this branch. (Please, use a mirror as soon as it propagates.)
A patch for ICH9 users
Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch for anyone with an ICH9 chipset-using motherboard. Give it a try.
07/25/2008
Hammer and Tux3
Pedro F. Giffuni happened to catch Daniel Phillips’ announcement of a new Linux filesystem, Tux3, which he compared to Hammer. The followups between Daniel Phillips and Matthew Dillon are interesting, and go deeply into the design decisions being made for each product. It’s a lot of words; be prepared, and I think there will be more conversation past what I’ve linked here.
07/24/2008
Hammer tips
Tip 1: You can’t have too big a volume for Hammer.
Tip 2: Snapshots are the easiest way to track historical data.
07/23/2008
Binary pkgsrc packages for 2.0
I’ve completed a full build of binary pkgsrc packages. However, bandwidth to dragonflybsd.org is getting hit pretty hard right now, so please, be patient and use a mirror if possible. (once they update…)
07/22/2008
Release announcements around the web
The DragonFly 2.0 release announcement is popping up in various places around the web: DistroWatch, Unix.com, LinuxQuestions.org, and of course KernelTrap.
LinkedIn DragonFly group
I’ve created a DragonFly BSD group at LinkedIn, a business networking site. If you’re already using it, search for that group name and add yourself – I’ll get the request and approve it. There’s no major purpose, other than getting a group formed. It is a good place to find potential job candidates…
07/21/2008
2.0 released
Read and go! Please use a mirror if possible. If you’re feeling torrentish, Christian Sturm has a BitTorrent link.
BSDTalk 155: Martin Tournoij
BSDTalk 155 is a short 7 minute interview with Martin Tournoij from DaemonForums.org.
07/20/2008
Release slightly delayed for mirrors
Do you run a mirror? Make sure you’re downloading the 2.0 release ISO. The release won’t officially happen until there’s enough ISOs floating around for people to actually reach it.
07/19/2008
Last minute Hammer simplification
Matthew Dillon made some last-minute changes to Hammer mirroring;Â it’s made the options a lot simpler.
07/18/2008
Last chance for commits
If you want to commit something for 2.0, do it now!
If you are so inclined, test 2.0 building with a ‘cd /usr/src/nrelease; make installer release‘
Linkdump for 07/18
More links for fun:
- The newest @Play column explores the limitations of using alphabet letters to represent all species in roguelike games.
- From the you-will-need-this-someday department: Giorgos Keramidas describes how to change your keymap for the Windows key. (via)
- Clay Shirky describes the existence of open source communities (needs Flash) and how they manage to last. Focuses on Perl, but applies to how most open source projects work. This talk captures the reasons for open source better than anything I’ve seen. (via)
- A Google talk (which also needs Flash) with the creators of the WarGames movies. WarGames is probably the last, most realistic Hollywood movie ever made about computer hacking. (via)
07/17/2008
Hammer: disconnect with impunity
Matthew Dillon posted a July 16th Hammer update where he details causing a lot of write activity on a USB-connected, Hammer-formatted hard drive, and then yanking the USB connector out. Apparently, doing that 50 times over didn’t even faze Hammer. (Of course, be careful trying that with power.) He’s been committing a lot for Hammer, along with Sascha Wildner and Thoman Nikolajsen. A side benefit is that the Hammer work has exposed some issues in CAM.
Bonus link: Matthew Dillon talks about ‘purposeful destabilization‘, and man pages for hammer(8) and mount_hammer(8) are now available online.
07/16/2008
Happy 5th birthday, DragonFly
It’s been 5 years since Matthew Dillon announced DragonFly. Happy 5th birthday, us!
07/14/2008
2.0 is branched – one week countdown!
2.0 is going to be released on the 20th. If you’re committing, make sure to put it both in the 2.0 and 2.1 branches, please. And get it in quickly! If you’ve contributed changes to this release, please get them listed in the 2.0 release document that Matthias Schmidt has been conscientiously updating.
Can I borrow your lighter?
Sometimes BSD references show up in wierd places. (marginally NSFW) (Via)
07/13/2008
2.0 on 20
The 2.0 release of DragonFly will be on the 20th of this month. I’ll be working on a new set of pkgsrc packages to match.
Last minute on Hammer
Matthew Dillon posted a note about a last-minute bug in Hammer – make sure you sync before unmounting. It will only lose about 30 seconds of data at worst. He should have it fixed today, with the 2.0 branching tonight.
Hammer as of July 12th: mirroring
Matthew Dillon’s posted another one of his Hammer updates: mirroring is done, and there’s a few outstanding issues he lists.
07/12/2008
More multiply ‘mazing material
There’s been a lot of linkworthy things lately, which I will list here in an effort to catch up:
- Jeremy C. Reed kindly updated BIND in DragonFly to cover for the recent cross-vendor DNS issue.
- Michael Neumann removed the 3-decade-old bug in yacc recently found by an OpenBSD developer.
- Smallest possible actual file size on Hammer: 272 bytes.
- Peter Avalos updated libarchive to 2.5.5. He detailed plans to start using the BSD-licensed version of cpio, with the GNU version dropped by DragonFly’s 2.3 release.
- This conversation between Dmitri Nikulin and Matthew Dillon is very interesting, partially because it contains detailed opinions from experienced people, but also because it’s an amicable disagreement – a rare thing on the Internet.
- Michael Neumann has added support for the NVIDIA MCP61, MCP65, MCP67, MCP73 and MCP77 chipsets, some of it from FreeBSD.
07/10/2008
More links from Dru
I know I just posted something like this, but Dru Lavigne’s got another link collection. The story about dsw is a gem.
Mirroring details
Matthew Dillon’s latest commit of mirroring for Hammer has some details on how it works, for the curious.
07/09/2008
Timezones and the details
Sascha Wildner has updated timezone info. Check the commit message, though… apparently, there’s a lot more changes going on with the international system of timezones than I ever expected.
nfe, et improvements
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent nfe(4) and et(4) changes have made some significant network speed improvements.
07/08/2008
Linkpile for 07/08/2008
Is it a linkpile if I link to someone else’s linkpile?
- Dru Lavigne’s posted another one of her link roundups.
- A cruel Hans Reiser joke buried in a Wikipedia edit. (via)
- The howling void brings news of a virtual C system. It sounds interesting from the description, and at the same time bizarre. C already runs on pretty much every platform ever; it seems strange to have to virtualize it to make it work.
- Update your DNS server.
- An old bug and a crazy bug.
BSDTalk 154: Hey, it’s Matt!
Matthew Dillon is this week’s subject on BSDTalk, with 30 minutes of conversation and lots of Hammer content.
07/07/2008
News sites, like this one, and not like this one
This post on the “gentrification of geek communities” is interesting, and somewhat relevant to what I’m trying to do with the Digest. However, the author seems to have more of a concern about which sites appear the most hip, rather than viewing them as secondary mechanisms for reporting on the actual news items found there. (Via)
Perhaps that’s the sign a geek news site has ‘jumped the shark’: when appearing on it is more exciting than reading the news articles present. e.g. the Slashdot Effect rather than the Slashdot News.
New Hammer PDF
Matthew Dillon has updated his Hammer documentation (pdf), with more details on data integrity and mirroring.
MPLS support added
Nuno Antunes has added experimental MPLS over Ethernet support. Note that this will require a complete rebuild if you are running bleeding-edge code.
07/06/2008
Google Summer of Code midterms
The mid-term evaluation for Google Summer of Code work is coming up for the week of July 7th – meaning it starts tomorrow. If you’re a student or a mentor, read my post on the kernel@ mailing list, and make sure you complete your evaluations befoer the 14th.
(side note: TGEN, where are you?)
Easy money for an update
‘Rumko’ has posted a 75 euro bounty (that’s something like USD $150 a bunch of dollars) for anyone who updates nataraid in DragonFly; it should be a straightforward change from FreeBSD. The details are available on the Code Bounty page on the wiki, as referenced on the mailing lists.
07/05/2008
Thanks, Hasso
Hasso Tepper has been doing a lot of work updating pkgsrc packages for DragonFly; look at one of his recent bulk reports to see the details.
07/04/2008
More roguelikes!
Another week, another @Play column talking about roguelikes. This time, it’s about Izuna, a Japanese ‘JCRPG’.
Also, Sascha Wilder (I think – lost the email, sorry!) pointed out that the ultimate roguelike may actually be Dwarf Fortress, a theory I have heard before. (links to go Rock Paper Shotgun, one of my favorite game sites.)
Fixing Firefox
The 2.0.0.15 update to Firefox seems to have broken it on DragonFly. Hasso Tepper asks: can someone work on a fix? He lacks time, but this needs to work in pkgsrc for our upcoming release.
07/03/2008
Hammer, July 2nd: mirroring, releases
Matthew Dillon’s posted another update on the state of Hammer. It’s mostly about adding mirroring support now, along with a mention of the 2.0 release coming in 2 weeks.
Many cores in the future
Jeremy C. Reed pointed at a recent article quoting Intel staff as warning developers to “prepare for thousands of cores”. Matthew Dillon had some thoughts on the issue.
07/02/2008
Proportional scheduler details
Mayur Bhosle has posted details about his Proportional Scheduler project for the Google Summer of Code.
Firefox upgrading
By the way, Firefox 3 is out but not in pkgsrc… officially. If you want to move to 3 right now, you can find it in pkgsrc-wip.
Update: As several people commented, it is out, though I wasn’t seeing it in the normal place I look.
07/01/2008
Open systems
This Wired article on Android is worth reading. Not because it’s directly related to DragonFly, but because it’s a open source platform. If you’re interested in DragonFly, you must have at least a passing interest in open source software.
We’re all used to being able to install and configure (and break) our BSD systems the way we want, when we want, without having to seek permission or necessarily pay a fee to someone who isn’t the author of the software we want. This is not generally possible with phones, which, after all, are specialized computer systems. Keep an eye on this.
(Via)
Hammer update needed
Matthew Dillon’s latest Hammer update prevents data corruption when the disk is full. Update, if you are following the bleeding edge.
