Archive for August 2008

08/31/2008
LiveDVD SoC result

Louisa Luciani has created her DragonFly LiveDVD, complete with X and a nice desktop.  I really like this thing.

08/30/2008
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.

08/29/2008
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?

08/28/2008
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.)

08/27/2008
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.

08/26/2008
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.

08/25/2008
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.

08/24/2008
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.

08/23/2008
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.

Analysis benefits

Sascha Wildner has been fixing various bugs in DragonFly through use of reports generated by the LLVM/Clang static analyzer.  There are many more fixes made by Sascha than what I linked here - thanks, Sascha!

08/22/2008
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)