www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.
Month: May 2010
05/30/2010
GEM and KMS progress for GSoC
Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.
Things to eat up your day
It’s a holiday weekend, at least in the United States, so I’m posting few things that take time to view.
Murray Stokely mentioned this in a comment, but it’s juicy enough to warrant a post: the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube has all 17 of the recent AsiaBSDCon 2010 presentations, plus a lot more from other conferences.
Phil Foglio, the fellow who drew the original BSD Daemon, has several comics strips, all of which are available for free – Buck Godot (complete), MythAdventures (in progress), What’s New with Phil and Dixie (in progress), and Girl Genius (in progress and in print).
05/27/2010
Messylaneous for 2010/05/27: destroying flash, Unix, programming
I had a sudden buildup of things to link to. It’s three items, but there’s enough info here to eat a few hours…
- Flash Destroyer: (destroying hardware, not like what Apple’s trying) found via the howling void, which of course has lots of complaints about technical inaccuracy. Still, interesting to contrast this with swapcache usage. The Bus Pirate on that site also sounds interesting.
- Handling multiple SSH keys in your SSH config: talks about one issue that came out of a larger IBM developerWorks UNIX tips article which is part of a larger series. I may have linked to parts of it before; it’s firmly packed with usefulness. Seriously, go read.
- Dru Lavigne linked to this article about the future of software development, and I agree with her: it’s a good prediction of the very near future.
05/26/2010
More event tracing work
Aggelos Economopoulos posted more details on his event tracing library, accompanied by a rash of commits. He’s interested in feedback.
Big network stack changes
Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
05/24/2010
Long-term swapcache results
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.
05/23/2010
New HOWTO: swapcache
Dylan Reinhold has contributed a HOWTO document on setting up swapcache. Thanks, Dylan!
05/22/2010
Last-ditch disk effort
YONETANI Tomokazu pointed out something that could be useful in the future: when you start getting drive errors, before you throw it out, try lowering the speed. Maybe it’s a cable problem, if you’re lucky.
05/21/2010
BSD Magazine: Industrial
Not the music, but the setting. The May issue of BSD Magazine is out, though there isn’t a page for it on the website yet. Instead, I’ll point at the PDF.
(I posted about the last issue twice, didn’t I? Oops.)
05/19/2010
Projects and money available
As described on the kernel@ mailing list, there’s several code bounties out now, formed in part from GSoC projects that didn’t get a slot. All of them have money waiting behind them. (I’d sure like to see better interrupt routing.)
05/18/2010
Someone is wrong on the Internet!
As McLone points out, the filesystem comparison page on Wikipedia is missing some Hammer details. Anyone want to fill in the pertinent numbers?
More Gource and BSD
Paul Onyschuk went and created a very neat and very long Gource movie using one of the oldest codebases out there: NetBSD. It’s available on Vimeo. His original data is available if anyone wants to try something similar.
Messylaneous for 2010/05/18: Facebook, fsck
A brief history of fsck (via) Is “A Brief History of X” a meme all by itself? Searching on it gave me this book of course, but also this interesting article about Internet history.
I’ve been restraining myself from a Facebook rant (other than deleting my Facebook account), as there’s plenty of people complaining about Facebook out there. This description, however, is as good a reason as anything for why there’s better choices.
Speaking of getting away from Facebook and fsck, apparently a “dirty Unix joke” made it into a New York Times photo about Facebook alternatives. (via)
That was my best segue ever.
Totally unrelated now: “Clicky” keyboards, and various links about them. (via) There’s at least a few person who’s going to read those links and get excited based on a mix of nostalgia and utility.
05/17/2010
Old release users: update pkg_radd
I’m removing the links for the old (DragonFly 2.3 and older) pkg_radd paths on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. If you have one of those older systems, you can update one line in pkg_radd if it’s useful to you.
BSD meetup in London
Sevan Janiyan passed along a note: there’s a *BSD meetup at the Barrowboy and Banker pub
by London Bridge, in London, the 27th of May. I’d love to attend, both because it’s BSD and because it’s a pub. That pesky Atlantic gets in the way.
05/16/2010
BSDCan 2010 videos online
FOSSLC has videos of the presentations from the recent BSDCan. (via) I’m listening to Will Backman’s keynote right now about the BSD community based on his BSDTalk work.
Update: Dru has a list of videos and pictures.
Idle page zeroing committed
Venkatesh Srinivas has been working on idle page zeroing; his work has been committed, and if enabled, should contribute to a teeny speedup. What’s it do? It gets memory ready for use when the CPU is not otherwise busy, so that less time is needed to allocate that memory. It looks like there’s more work on the way, too.
05/15/2010
Potential pf update
The version of pf in DragonFly is somewhat long in the tooth, but Jan Lentfer’s volunteered himself for the herculanean job of updating it. Go, Jan! Let’s hope this large task is more Nemean than Augean.
05/14/2010
Have you tried BSDStats?
Marc G. Fournier posted some statistics gathered from his BSDStats service. It’s possible to activate this right now on DragonFly. Just put
monthly_statistics_enable="YES"
in /etc/rc.conf. For details, there’s the man page.
05/12/2010
BSD Events link added
Have I managed to forget all this time to add Dru Lavigne’s excellent BSD Events Twitter feed to my link list on the Digest? Yes, I did – fixed.
Rolling everything back
If you have a Hammer filesystem, and you want to roll the entire thing back to a previous snapshot – all files, everywhere – it can be accomplished with one command.
05/11/2010
Note on NAT
Did you know… ipfw/natd appears to be broken in DragonFly 2.6? Using pf is a better choice, at least, but I found it out the hard way.
05/10/2010
AsiaBSDCon videos up
Videos of the presentations at AsiaBSDCon 2010 are up; FreeBSD – The Unknown Giant has a number of them. Constantine A. Murenin’s Quiet Computing presentation is interesting, especially because it runs on DragonFly.
05/09/2010
Some pkgsrc reports
I’ve put a few of the reports from pkgsrc builds on DragonFly out. They’re all using pkgsrc-2010Q1, on i386/DragonFly 2.6, i386/DragonFly 2.7, and x86_64/DragonFly 2.7. The links in the reports go to the errors that caused each package to not build. If you happen to see something that has an easy fix, or that you really need to have working, please submit a fix.
Back in action
Sorry – temporary power outage from high winds killed shiningsilence.com for about a day. Back now!
05/07/2010
2.6.3 announcement up
The ISO images have been filtering out to the mirrors for a while already, but the 2.6.3 release is officially announced on the DragonFly website and release page.
05/06/2010
pkgsrc-2010Q1 available in binary form
Binary packages built for DragonFly 2.6 and 2.7 from the most recent pkgsrc quarterly release, 2010Q1, are now available. The utility pkg_radd will access them, or you can download directly.
BSDday Argentina paper details
Sdävtaker has posted about the pre-call for papers, for BSDday Argentina. Check his post for topic and submission details.
There goes BIND
As previously foreshadowed, BIND has been removed from the DragonFly base system. Instead, it’s installed from pkgsrc. Note that this includes tools like nslookup or host. Instructions after the jump.
05/05/2010
3 things for pkgsrc
From my email to users@:
- I almost have pkgsrc-2010Q1 builds done for every architecture, so I’ll point the default load location for pkg_radd to them within the next 24 hours.
- Are you still using a DragonFly system older than 2.4 and downloading binaries? If so, tell me.
- A project: enhancing pkg_search and pkg_radd to be able to tell when a package is missing because of license restrictions. Anyone want to try it?
05/04/2010
2.6.3 out and about
DragonFly 2.6.3 is tagged and available, as previously planned. You can update to it normally, or go to a 2.6.3 ISO; available at various mirrors.
05/02/2010
BSDTalk 189: TheorArm and Robin Watts
The latest BSDTalk brings you TheorArm and Robin Watts, with discussion of the ARM architecture; my favorite processor type that I’ve never used. TheorArm was recently relicensed from GPL to BSD thanks to the efforts from people at Google.
05/01/2010
Apache options change in pkgsrc
If you use Apache, as many people do, some of the default building choices have changed in pkgsrc. Read Matthias Scheler’s post for details.
May OSBR: Communications Enabled Applications
The May issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and the theme is “Communications Enabled Applications”. Sounds obscure, but it’s about deriving a business advantage from networks. In fact, one article directly relates to one of my biggest current projects at work.