Vincent Stemen has a compiled version of the Linux Test Project available to download and run for anyone interested in helping linuxulator progress. Note that this is not a coding exercise, but rather a reporting exercise, so that we can identify what needs work in the linuxulator.
Month: January 2010
pkgsrc-2009Q4 release announcement
It’s been available to build for some time, but the official announcement for pkgsrc-2009Q4 is out. It’s worth reading to see what new packages pushed it over the 9,000 mark.
01/30/2010
New HAMMER presentation
Michael Neumann presented a talk on HAMMER at the Karlsruher Institut
für Technologie on January 27th. His slides (in English) are now available in PDF or ODP formats, and are listed on the dragonflybsd.org Presentations page.
01/27/2010
Google Summer of Code 2010: it’s on
Google Summer of Code for 2010 is accepting applications from mentor organizations starting March 8th. Pending acceptance by Google, DragonFly will participate.
If you’ve got ideas, or if you want to mentor (or both!), enter something on the GSOC 2010 page on the DragonFly website.
Packages for 2.5/i386 available
A fresh set of pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.5.x/i386 are ready, and already available on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. pkg_radd will fetch them.
01/24/2010
Things that are done
There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!
- Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it. He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on the way too.
- Binary pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.4.x/i386 are all uploaded.
- I finished a build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.5.x/x86_64 – take a look and fix some of the broken items, if that interests you.
- Weekend reading: check out this Trivium post as there’s some interesting historical items. I may try that LackRack idea in a environment that doesn’t fit a normal rack well…
01/23/2010
pkgsrc-2009Q4 binaries almost ready
A build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.4/i386 is complete, and uploading now to avalon.dragonflybsd.org. When the upload’s done, I’ll change the symlink so that pkg_radd downloads from the new collection. Builds for x86_64 and 2.5 will be done soon.
There’s a couple packages – lang/mono, devel/boost-libs – that can be fixed with some updates; I’ll do so next chance I get.
Watch out on the bleeding edge with UFS
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5 and updated in the past week or so, and have UFS disks, there’s some instability introduced by Matthew Dillon’s recent work. It ought to be better by next week.
Users of Hammer, or of UFS only as /boot, don’t have anything to worry about.
01/21/2010
A project: security checks for pkgsrc
It’s been possible for some time to automatically check for vulnerabilities in installed pkgsrc packages. However, it requires some initial setup work. NetBSD now will check automatically if there’s any packages installed. The same feature could work in DragonFly – I have a post about that even links to the appropriate changes. Someone want to take this on?
BIND updated to 9.5.2-P2
BIND has been updated by Jan Lentfer, fixing two recent vulnerabilities. His note about the update has a link to vulnerability info, for the curious. Along the same lines, Jeremy C. Reed is looking for others using DNSSEC, just to see how widespread it is.
01/20/2010
Recent development improvements
Matthew Dillon has a summary of the development work he’s done over the past week or so. The condensed version: things faster, bugs fixed. Generally what you want to hear.
01/19/2010
More pkgsrc chopping
Joerg Sonnenberger’s planning to remove more old pkgsrc packages. This includes some packages like php4, which is common and also should die. There’s discussion that can be followed from the post for some details.
01/18/2010
Jobs jobs jobs
The economy, at least in the U.S., seems to be improving. With that in mind, I’ve seen some traffic on the freebsd-jobs mailing list lately. BSD-specific jobs are harder to come by, so take a look if you’re ‘in the market’.
01/17/2010
DNSSEC now supported
Jan Lentfer’s committed support for DNSSEC. It’s supported by default, meaning you can use it right now on a 2.5.1+ system. He’s tested it locally using these instructions, which I link to for everyone’s edification. Is this important? A lot of people seem to think so.
01/16/2010
High-performance SSH patch added
Peter Avalos has added the HPN patch for OpenSSH; the commit message notes changes and links to a page with far more detail and acronyms than I can easily fit in a post.
01/15/2010
pkgsrc: it’s over 9,000!
I started building the pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages on several machines tonight, and I noticed something. The previous quarterly release, pkgsrc-2009Q3, had 8,969 packages. This release has 9,100. That’s right – OVER 9,000!
Messylaneous for 2010/01/15
Still not used to typing “2010″.
- I have no idea if bup is a worthwhile backup tool or even if it would compile on DragonFly, but more products should be described this way. (via)
- I’ve seen plenty of articles along the lines of “Open Source and X”, where the article explains at great length how open source in certain situations can work well. “Doing It Wrong” comes at it from a different direction.
- BSD Magaine is going free, meaning it’s a free download starting with the February issue. The site says “sign up for our newsletter and get every issue straight to your inbox” – the correct link is “Newsletter” on the upper right corner of the page. PDFs of the print issues are available too.
- The Open Source Business Resource is now publishing weekly articles in addition to their monthly issue. The inaugural article is “Avatar, Open Source and Humanity 2.0” by Stephen Huddart, and the second is “Do, Delegate, Defer” by the wonderfully-named Emma Jane Hogbin.
- Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX: linked many places. It’s a good argument, which reminds me… anyone want to work on DRM for DragonFly? It could use some loving.
- A Python script that takes your picture and uploads it every time a merge (in Mercurial) fails. Someone make this work for Git, please. (via)
- Speaking of Git, here’s a way to get auto-complete of git commands and local/remote branches in bash.
- The latest @Play covers the new, developing roguelike Dungeon Crawl, part 1 of many. It’s listed as running on “all the BSDs”, though I don’t see it in pkgsrc. It is playable via telnet to other servers, though.
pkgsrc-2009Q4 branched
There isn’t an official release announcement as of this moment, but the next quarterly release of pkgsrc is out. This is 2009Q4, meaning development happened in the 4th quarter of 2009. I’ll start binary package builds for DragonFly tonight…
01/14/2010
Hello, government!
I noticed some slowness when reaching this server, this morning. Logging in, there was no heavy CPU or swap usage. Looking at netstat, I saw the reason: the Department of Homeland Security was poking around.
01/13/2010
The pkgsrc chop
Joerg Sonnenberger is planning to remove a number of outdated or broken packages from pkgsrc, after the next quarterly release. Speak up if you’re actively using one of those packages slated for removal.
When is that next quarterly release, anyway? It was due the 7th, as far as I know…
01/12/2010
More REDO
That didn’t take long: Matthew Dillon has an update on his REDO work; he’s about halfway there. His summary includes instructions on how to test this new work, including ways to change how Hammer syncs to disk.
01/11/2010
Huge cleanup for games
Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9). This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.
I draw attention to this not because it changed anything with the games in a functional sense, but because it’s huge (450 files changed, 31450 insertions(+), 29998 deletions(-)) and because it came out of nowhere. It’s always nice to have new surprise contributions arrive.
01/10/2010
Hammer REDO and other storage notes
Matthew Dillon declared his intention to have REDO working for Hammer very soon. This will improve speed by lowering the number of fsync()s needed in a given period of time to flush data to disk.
He continues in a separate message talking at length about data flushing and how to implement it efficiently, with some comparisons to work in FreeBSD. The followups are worth reading, too.
Interest in tmpfs, again
Antonio Huete Jimenez wants to find anyone working on tmpfs for DragonFly; his post about it summarizes the work so far. He’s interested in working on it, in any case.
01/09/2010
BSDTalk 184: Matthew Dillon and DragonFly
Why, BSDTalk 184 is our very own Matthew Dillon talking about all the recent changes in DragonFly, for a good half-hour! I’ve listened to about half of it so far… I hadn’t realized the significance of some of the changes in the last two releases. It’s also strange to hear someone mentioning the work you’ve done (pkgsrc bulk builds)…
OpenSSL and also DNSSEC
Jan Lentfer’s posted the steps to test OpenSSL encryption – I link to them because it’s interesting to see the steps spelled out.
Jan’s also posted a patch to enable DNSSEC support throughout BIND and related tools. Test if this interests you. (and it should.)
01/07/2010
Fix for common libc problem
There’s a recent libc vulnerability that appears to be present in every BSD and Linux flavor. (Nearly every? There’s a lot…) Antonio Huete Jimenez committed the fix, with instructions on how to just rebuild libc for thatupdate.
01/06/2010
Too much ram: it’s possible
I’ve always said you can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM. (I’m paraphrasing a quote from the Dutchess of Windsor.) However, maybe you can have too much RAM. Recent changes by Matthew Dillon have made it possible to run the kernel_map out of RAM depending on the quantity of video RAM and system RAM in use.
This isn’t a significant danger; I’m highlighting it because it’s an odd problem. It’s easy to work around for now. There’s a new utility, kmapinfo, to show mow much kernel memory is being used.
Hammer downgrade and upgrade bug
Thomas Nikolajsen experienced firsthand a bug where downgrading a Hammer PFS master to a slave and then later making it a master again lost all data. Lucky him… The problem’s now fixed.
01/05/2010
Crypto testing needed
Jan Lentfer needs someone with cryptographic hardware that isn’t padlock (e.g. not VIA) to test his recent OpenSSL upgrade. Do you have hardware that matches? Please help.
vr(4) driver fixup
Jan Lentfer noticed a lot of errors with his vr(4) card under load. Matthew Dillon suggested some reasons/fixes, and then made a commit that may fix it. Please test if you have an older Rhine card.
01/04/2010
MPSAFE details
In response to a question about fine-grained vs. coarse locking, Matthew Dillon detailed the locking types used by DragonFly and the remaining work left to make the system able to function completely without the Giant Lock. (hint: VM, something Matt’s known for.)
dragonflybsd.org fixed
There were some errors with the dragonflybsd.org domain, which are now fixed. This includes some issues in NNTP access to the discussion groups, which is why I don’t have a link for this.
01/02/2010
Update for spamassassin
This has been bouncing around other news outlets, but I’ll mention it here: There’s an out of data SpamAssassin rule that can potentially mark mail as spam because of the 2010 date. A mail to tech-pkg@netbsd.org describes the various fixes.
The step of ‘sa-update && /etc/rc.d/spamd restart’ seems to have fixed it for me. Incidentally, if you are using SpamAssassin, sa-update is a good tool to run on a regular basis.
Bleeding edge made less sharp
As previously noted, some of Matthew Dillon’s work was potentially destabilizing. The “danger period” (I saw no issues reported) is over.
01/01/2010
OSBR: Success factors
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “success factors”. Many of the articles focus on participation, and it’s an interesting read. February’s theme is “Startups”, with articles due by Jan. 20th if you’re contributing one.