Louisa Luciani has created her DragonFly LiveDVD, complete with X and a nice desktop. I really like this thing.
Month: August 2008
Different dhcpd, diverging dhclient
dhcp-3 has been removed from the base install of DragonFly. Instead, the install CD will come with the pkgsrc version. Matthias Schmidt and Andras Voroskoi ported over the OpenBSD version of dhclient.
Significant AMD64 code committed
Matthew Dillon has committed a significant amount of work from Jordan Gordeev’s Summer of Code project, for AMD64 support. (It is very close to being able to completely boot an AMD64 kernel) As he says in the commit message, the code is the product of many folks, but with much credit to Jordan Gordeev for getting the work to this point. As far as I know, Jordan will continue working on this past the Summer of Code, which makes it a double success.
FreeBSD job feed
Dru Lavigne brings news of oDesk offering a BSD job trends page and RSS feed – focusing on FreeBSD, since I daresay that’s the largest part of the market. More like this please!
Pretty Nethack
The latest @Play column on GameSetWatch describes something I never expected to see: graphical, accessible versions of NetHack. Is part of the experience for some people staring at a terminal?
Simple scheduler showing
Not news, but a succinct description of DragonFly’s scheduler. Bits of what’s described there have shown up in news posts here, but I think this is the first full description.
Apache 2.2 update in pkgsrc
Eric Gillespie posted in the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org to announce the apache22 package now has shared module support; it’s not on by default. (Apache’s a common enough program that it’s worth singling out this announcement.)
DragonFly and JRSL08
Damian Vicino wrote up his experience presenting DragonFly at JRSL 2008; it apparently was lightly attended because of another big event, but the DragonFly presentation was interesting enough they ran long and had to keep answering questions even after the next presentation started. (previously mentioned here)
Transactional reading
As part of a larger discussion about transactional file systems, Dmitri Nikulin posted a link to two relatively recent blog posts by Jeff Robinson talking about I/O atomicity and file offset semantics.
Why vi?
For those readers who use vi or vim or another vi-like editor, here’s an interesting writeup of how to make vim really work for you. Emacs users, please look away. (via someone on IRC)
5 years of the DragonFly BSD Digest
5 years of this Digest, with around 3,000 posts, starting from the first in 2003. Why isn’t there more like this, more frequently, in the BSD world?
pkg_radd a bit faster
The pkg_radd utility that comes with DragonFly downloads binary pkgsrc packages from a variety of mirrors and installs them automatically. However, the mirror script wasn’t redirecting to servers other than the overloaded pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; I corrected that and it now downloads randomly from a number of mirrors.
More AMD64 work
Matthew Dillon’s been committing parts (example link) of Jordan Gordeev’s Summer of Code project for AMD64 support. It’s not done yet, but it should be by end-of-year.
More Tux3 details
KernelTrap has a nice article up covering Daniel Phillips’ description of the Tux3 file system structure, which will be interesting to anyone who followed the previous file system discussion between Phillips and Matthew Dillon.
Threads, visualized
I’m not sure if I’ve linked to this before, so anyway: Robert Luciani linked to a nice image explaining how threads work in DragonFly, translating from pthread to LWP to LWKT.
MeetBSD 2008
MeetBSD 2008 is happening November 15th and 16th, at the Googleplex. This one coincides with the 15th anniversary of FreeBSD, too. Check the Speakers page for details on what’s happening.
August OSBR: Education
As Dru Lavigne noted a few days ago, the August issue of the Open Source Business Resource, focusing on Education, is now available.
Continuing multiprocessor work
Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on parallelizing DragonFly networking can be tried out (for those running bleeding edge code) by setting the sysctl kern.intr_mpsafe to 1.
BSD Magazine issue 2
The second issue of BSD Magazine is out, though the details aren’t up on the magazine’s site as of this writing – freebsdnews.net has the cover and contents. This issue gets into OpenBSD. (via)
Why a BSD license?
I had a conversation with a coworker today about what phone to buy, and I thought about this: iPhones are pretty, but you don’t get to own your software or fully choose what to run. This developer’s blog entry sums up all the things you can’t do with Apple’s App Store, and by doing so manages to describe the opposite of open source. (via, I think) The point I’m making: BSD licensing is more valuable than you think.
BSDTalk 156: NYCBSDCon
The latest BSDTalk (actually from August 18th – I’m still catching up) has Isaac Levy and Steven Kreuzer talking about NYCBSDCon 2008, coming up October 11-12. It’s 15 minutes total.
Interregnum interrupted
Sorry about a week without posts! I was in the wilds of Canada and without any Internet access, for probably the longest period for me since 1995. It was weird. Regular posts resume tomorrow.
Two links to make you think
One link to describe the pain of creating with software/the web, and one link that will make you want to keep doing it.
(Culled from other blog’s posts – sorry, lost original entries!)
Links and video
Dru Lavigne has posted another set of BSD links, and something I wouldn’t expect: a video presentation (Youtube) of the table of contents to the July Open Source Business Resource.
Details for dma(8)
Max Lindner posted a status update and a detailed followup on his Summer of Code project, dma(8). Matthias Schmidt asked for more DMA testing; it’s worth trying if you don’t care for Sendmail.
Hammer update, details
Matthew Dillon has posted an update for the 9th on the state of Hammer. The next big question: should the Hammer code for porter be stored in Subversion or Git?
Also: Nothing earth shattering, but this post on users@ has some details on Hammer usage and how it works with large files and with backups in general.
Who can actually use this?
A recent commit from Matthew Dillon enables use of at least a terabyte of swap space. Is there anyone who can actually use that much yet? Swap is traditionally 2x available memory, so that would make for 500 gigabytes of RAM. I don’t think that’s even workable, though you’d be able to build up a heck of a MFS.
DVD playback fixed
Steve O’Hara-Smith found that DVD playback didn’t work unless compiling with gcc34. Matthew Dillon’s implemented a possible fix.
Network work from both ends
Aggelos Economopoulos is looking for feedback for his NetMP (meaning giant lock removal from the network stack) work.
In a similar vein, Sepherosa Ziehau has committed the first stage of the first step of his parallelization of ipfw(4).
(Thanks to Sascha Wildner for the man page correction)
DragonFly on Facebook
Antonio Huete Jimenez has created a DragonFly Facebook group; join up, if you’re a Facebook user.
(Update: fixed the accidentally Anglicized name – sorry!)
LiveDVD website is up
Louisa Luciani has put up a website for her Google Summer of Code LiveDVD project. (Work history is also available.)
Caveat: I don’t know if it’s done yet, as the work period for GSoC projects is not quite over.
Linkpile 8/8/8
Today is one of those dates that’s fun to type. Anyway!
- KernelTrap has a summarization of the recent Tux3/Hammer discussion between Matthew Dillon and Daniel Phillips. Read for the summary, stay for the mind-boggling filesystem design detail.
- Philip Paeps has a note on his blog on how to use one-time passwords, good for when you are traveling and know you won’t be connecting from secure locations. He does it on FreeBSD, but it works on DragonFly too. (update: site seems to be down. Darn. Look at opiepasswd(1) in the meantime.)
- This article titled “Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)” talks about how people generally don’t mind copying; what makes them mad is attribution. e.g. Someone copying your works doesn’t bother people unless the copier claims the work is his or her own. This is not an unfamiliar concept, folks. (via)
BSDNews back?
There’s something there being updated, though it just has the old icon and what looks like a default PHPNuke-ish interface. Hopefully some authorial voice will arise.
More feedback items
Samuel J. Greear started a new topic on kernel@: what Revision Control System should DragonFly move to, based on needs. This is a subject that can lead to lots of bikeshedding, but it has stayed pretty calm so far.
Also, ideas from me: packaging pkgsrc into releases, and zipping the release ISO.
Variations on PXE
As part of a larger discussion about PXE booting, Pedro F. Giffuni pointed at a Google Summer of Code project for FreeBSD, titled “http support for PXE“. This would be very convenient.
Hammer update: new mailing list
Matthew Dillon’s latest Hammer update, among other things, brings news of a Hammer mailing list specifically for people working on porting Hammer to other systems.
Hammer fixes coming up
Matthew Dillon is planning for the most recent minor bugfixes for Hammer to go in Wednesday; they will also be merged to the 2.0 branch.
With all these updates going in, a 2.0.1 release, sometime soon, appears likely.
New pkgsrc build
The 2008Q2 pkgsrc bulk build pn pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been redone; it should flow out to the mirrors normally.
20080804 links
These linkdumps are really kind of fun to do:
- Star Trek, the console game, from BASIC to C#. I knew the game was old, but not that it originated from 1971. A version is on your system right now, probably. (via)
- This week’s @Play column talks about modeling player motion in roguelike games.
- Hopefully, this report (among others) makes me sound a little less crazy when I say “You should be able to choose what software you can use, on hardware you own.” is one of the reasons for open source.
For your consideration: dragonflybsd.org
I have a tentative potential layout for dragonflybsd.org. As stated in my mail about it, I want opinions: comments plz!
SoC Scheduler info updated
Mayur Bhosle has updated his wiki page with the latest details on his Proportional Scheduler for Summer of Code.
GPT support, if you feel lucky
GPT partitioning is now supported, though Matthew Dillon’s post about it warns that it is very experimental. He also lists some interesting potential projects to go with it.