Mitja Horvat purchased an Intel D945GCLF motherboard, which worked fine with DragonFly except for some minor issues with hardware checksumming on the Realtek 8102EL network card.  He supplied a patch to fix this, which was committed. Edward O’Callaghan chimed in with some history of why this particular card was problematic in DragonFly and other operating systems.
Month: September 2008
09/29/2008
DragonFly on VirtualBox
Michael Neumann has a patch that makes DragonFly able to run on VirtualBox; Matthew Dillon has a suggestion on how to make the fix permanent, which also may help with clock timing under other virtualized setups.
2.0.1 is out
Somehow I missed this commit, but DragonFly 2.0.1 is out, with many changes to Hammer and other miscellaneous updates.
09/26/2008
BSDTalk 158: Chess Griffin
This week’s BSDTalk is a 24-minute talk with Chess Griffin, who put together the 100-podcast LinuxReality series.
Buncha Links
Dru Lavigne’s blog brings news of her upcoming convention schedule, the September issue of the OSBR, themed on “Social Innovation”, and an always-fun linkpile.
09/25/2008
More cross-BSD work
It’s always nice to see work benefiting multiple BSDs. (via) Joerg Sonnenberger also gets credit for committing patches from Hasso Tepper to pkgsrc, contributing to the upward success rate for pkgsrc packages building on DragonFly.
09/24/2008
pkgbox upgraded
pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been upgraded to DragonFly 2.1, and now has several Hammer volumes. This is the system that builds and hosts the pkgsrc binary packages.
More pkgsrc success
Hasso Tepper is continuing his pkgsrc bulk builds, with his most recent build showing 7,130 packages built successfully, an increase of 116 over his last build. (I don’t know if he’s using local patches…)
09/23/2008
Another step closer to lock removal
Sepherosa Ziehau has added code to make it possible to run network threads without the Big Giant Lock. It’s still experimental, so it has to be manually set via sysctl.
2.0.1 Real Soon Now
The 2.0.1 release of DragonFly will arrive soon, incorporating recent improvements to Hammer, including the new cleanup utility.
09/19/2008
GNOME and C# work
As a followup to his pkgsrc bulk build, Hasso Tepper would welcome contributions from anyone interested in making pkgsrc’s version of the GNOME desktop and the various C# utilities work better on DragonFly.
A bigger leaf
The development machine leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been upgraded with a lot more disk space. Development accounts on there are free for everyone, though keep in mind only some parts are backed up.
09/18/2008
Another pkgsrc build
Hasso Tepper completed a bulk build of pkgsrc (current) on DragonFly 2.1 – about 7/8th of all the packages built.
09/17/2008
Linkdump for 2008/09/17
Some random links for browsing that I’ve been holding onto:
- PCMag’s top 10 Greatest Hacks of All Time – Item #3 mentions my alma mater. (via)
- Readers of a certain age will enjoy Atari Modern Classics, plus the Bootleg Demakes (via)
- This GameSetWatch article on managerial rhetoric will be familiar to most anyone working in software.
- FreeBSD phone job in Canada – anyone interested?
pkgsrc freeze for 2008Q3
The freeze on pkgsrc development for the next quarterly release has been announced; expect the 2008Q3 branch in about 2 weeks.
BSDTalk 157: the Questions episode
Will Backman has put up a new, 6 minute BSDTalk episode, where he asks for suggestions on live streaming while visiting NYCBSDCon and also for ideas for his new hardware.
Renaming things, moving things
I did not realize this is possible: you can rename your network interfaces. This example uses FreeBSD, but it translates to DragonFly.  (via)
Also, Giorgos Keramidas has written up his experience getting his FreeBSD system moved from one laptop to another – useful steps to know, plus on DragonFly you could use cpdup to copy wholesale. (via)
09/14/2008
JMicron JMC250/JMC260 added
Sepherosa Ziehau has added the ids for the JMicron JMC250 and JMC260, both PCIe Ethernet chipsets. Strangely, the lower model number is gigabit, while the higher number is 100Mbit, if I read my searching correctly.
2.0.1 this Wednesday
DragonFly 2.0.1 is going to be rolled this Wednesday, so if there’s anything you need in there, speak up.
Software Freedom Day coming up
Software Freedom Day is September 20th. It’s a “worldwide celebration of Free and Open Source Software” – check to see if there’s an event happening in your city. (via)
09/13/2008
DRI may be easier, maybe not
Apparently, there’s some changes happening to DRI (the project, not just what’s in DragonFly). This may make it better or worse for any platform that isn’t Linux to keep up with the new code. Check the comments on that story for a variety of opinions.
(Linked by Hasso Tepper on #dragonflybsd on EFNet)
That’s a lot of lines
I’ve seen plenty of graphs, but this one describing BitTorrent performance on a FreeBSD cluster is surpisingly pretty, perhaps because of the scale.
(Spotted by sjg on #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
09/12/2008
How it’s made: OpenBSD
Undeadly has an brief, interesting article up, written by Mitja MuženiÄ, describing the OpenBSD releasing process. Worthwhile reading if you are involved in any sort of release cycle.
Some statistics
This Digest turned 5 a little while ago, and here’s another milestone: this is post 3,001. There’s 1,300 comments or so, too.
09/11/2008
Crash on purpose
If you are running bleeding edge DragonFly, and you don’t mind panicing your system, Sepherosa Ziehau has made some changes. Specifically, if you see messages on your console about rtfree_remote(), set net.route.remote_free_panic to 1 and post a link to the resulting coredump.
More power options
Hasso Tepper has supplied a patch to sysutils/pciutils that lets it compile on DragonFly; this means you can check the state of your devices and see if they are actually powered down.
09/10/2008
Summer of Code samples available
The Summer of Code samples from all the DragonFly participants are available now on the Google Code-hosted site. Visit the Downloads section to get the tarballs.
Scheduler changes
Matthew Dillon made some changes to the scheduler; his commit message has some interesting details.
09/09/2008
2008Q2 packages updated
The 2008Q2 packages collection on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org has been rebuilt and updated by me; any new binary packages should appear at a mirror soon.
Another good power idea
Hasso Tepper has another power patch; this one to turn off PCI devices when the corresponding module is unloaded. This can make laptops cooler by turning off the sound or network, for instance. It has been commited, though you need to tweak a sysctl to enable it.
09/07/2008
Notable NYCBSDCon
The NYCBSDCon 2008 schedule is up. Will Backman, of BSDTalk, will be there, and there will be BSD Certfication exams. Among other presentations, a certain Matthew Dillon will be talking about Hammer. (via Dru Lavigne)
qt1, qt2 retiring
Thomas Klausner is removing qt1 and qt2 from pkgsrc. If you’re using one of the few applications that still require them, tell him before the 14th.
09/06/2008
A happy accident
This sentence caught my eye from a recent commit by Sepherosa Ziehau: “it accidentally doubles the current lo0 performance“
OpenSSL updated
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 0.9.8h, which fixes “two moderate security flaws“. The original diffs came from Andras Voroskoi.
09/05/2008
Another Summer of Code project committed
Hasso Tepper has committed Dashu Huang’s “RFC3542 support” Summer of Code project.
More power improvements
In addition to committing acpi_cpu(4), Hasso Tepper has also enabled the powering-down of unused PCI devices. His post to users@ explains the details.
09/04/2008
2.2 release page, early
Matthias Schmidt has added a release info page for 2.2. This next release won’t be out for a few months, yet, but if you’re adding something new for that release, write it there so we don’t have to remember it all within 24 hours in January.
Return of rconfig
Remember rconfig(8)? Matthew Dillon’s added an example that will format a disk with UFS /boot and Hammer /everythingelse.
09/03/2008
Hasso has the power
Hasso Tepper has updated coretemp(4) to read from all cores, and has a test port of FreeBSD’s acpi_cpu code, which can reduce power usage and heat.
More booting changes
Matthew Dillon’s made more changes to the boot process, allowing the boot code to boot directly from a /boot partition. I’m abusing the English language with that last sentence.)Â This allows having a UFS /boot and a Hammer /everythingelse
09/02/2008
hunt(6) added
Matthew Dillon has added hunt(6) to DragonFly, calling it “The best multi-player terminal game ever!” Does that exclude MUDs? Mangband? IRC? (OK, that last one stretches it.) This version of hunt(6) came from OpenBSD, which came from the NetBSD version, all the way back to the original program in 4.4BSD. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer, for the history)
More Summer of Code commits
More chunks of the DragonFly Summer of Code projects are getting committed – recently, it’s Louisa Luciani’s LiveDVD work and some of Max Lindner’s work on dma(8). (more DMA work forthcoming)
09/01/2008
HEADS UP: the kernel moved
As Matthew Dillon writes in a post to kernel@: “The kernel & modules are now being installed in /boot/kernel and /boot/modules instead of /kernel and /modules.”
This means do a full buildworld and installworld if you are using bleeding edge code; this is to clean up the correct files.
HEADS UP: intr_mpsafe is enabled
Sepherosa Ziehau has enabled intr_mpsafe for bleeding edge code; see his warning if this causes issues for you. Another step closer to removing the big lock from networking…
