BSD Magazine sent out a link to all the BSD Magazine back issues, reproduced here for your enjoyment:
Month: June 2010
06/29/2010
Real world use and DragonFly
Siju George has written up his ‘real world’ experience with DragonFly in production; I should probably do the same since this site has been DragonFly-driven for years now. Add your story to the page.
Potential applicable power project
Matthew Dillon followed up on some comments from Sepherosa Ziehau about power management to describe a possible new way to manage power consumption; the project is up for grabs.
06/28/2010
New power controls
Matthew Dillon has added powerd(8), a daemon that adjusts CPU frequency based on activity; his initial report describes a whopping 40% power savings for server use.
06/27/2010
Messylaneous: Reviews, packaging, installers, etc
Link catchup!
- The BSD Certification Group needs reviewers for the BSDA exam objectives. It’s as easy as writing on a wiki.
- Undeadly has a lengthy article up about the OpenBSD equivalent of pkgsrc bulk builds, called dbp3. Interesting, because it was constructed on purpose, for that purpose. It’s interesting to me because I have pbulk running all the time, and it’s not as liner a process as I’d like.
- The PC-BSD installer is now present in FreeBSD; I think this is based on the same original installer used for DragonFly. Maybe, maybe not, but I’m curious about the feature set if it’s able to displace the venerable and firmly lodged FreeBSD sysinstall.
- Off topic: I bought an Android-based phone recently, so this (kinda grody) comment on how Apple handles bad reception for the new iPhone is entertaining.
- Really off topic: this man’s conversation about polyhedral dice (Youtube) is strangely compelling. You may or may have needed to play tabletop games previously to really appreciate it. (via)
pkgsrc git repo changes
Matthew Dillon set up a git copy of the pkgsrc repository some time ago. However, it’s had syncing problems, and there’s an ‘official’ pkgsrc git repository now which does not have the problems. You can still pull from the same place, but it’s the ‘master’ branch now. His heads-up message describes how to switch.
06/24/2010
Another image
Not actually related to DragonFly except by coincidental name, but it’s entertaining and imageblogging is fun. (via, some other images there nsfw)
06/22/2010
Free book, if you are lucky
Michael Lucas is giving away a limited number of copies of his new Network Flow Analysis book. Post something clever and you may get it. Please don’t be more clever than me, though, as I want a copy.
06/21/2010
Congratulations, Dru
Dru Lavigne is the new “Director of Community Development” for PC-BSD. I am totally jealous, and she is the perfect person for the job.
06/17/2010
BSDTalk 192: pf, Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen
There’s a new BSDTalk podcast up, again from BSDCan 2010. This one interviews Henning Brauer and Peter Hansteen about pf, for 20 minutes.
Freeze for pkgsrc-2010Q2 starts about now
It’s been 0.25 years since the last, so pkgsrc is due for another quarterly release. The usually-two-week freeze before release starts tonight. The release should happen at the end of the month.
06/16/2010
EuroBSDCon 2010 call for papers
EuroBSDCon 2010 is happening October 8th-10th in Karlsruhe, Germany. (I’ll let you guess the year.) The Call for Papers is out now. The website lists it as “Call for Speakers“, but you have to write an abstract so I suppose that’s close enough. (via lots of places)
06/14/2010
Better than yet another acronym
Venkatesh Srinivas has quoted a good phrase to sum up the work he and Matthew Dillon are doing to remove the Big Lock: ‘Less Lock, More Rock’
Qemu notes
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
06/13/2010
Progress update on pf
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.
More lazy reading
Normally I nab a few links from Christian Neukirchen’s blog for my Messylaneous link roundups, but his latest entry has more good ones than I can steal comfortably. Go read.
06/12/2010
Messylaneous – Unixy articles, clang, pkgsrc projects, more
- IBM’s developerWorks has an article up about GNU screen. It’s not BSD-specific, but the tips in using screen are useful. (Before someone brings it up: yes, tmux too.)
- Another article talks about inspecting network traffic using various tools including tcpdump and wireshark. It is a tremendous advantage to see what happens on a network at the most basic level, so this is a good skill to pick up.
- Oh, and “Setting up UNIX file systems” and “10 steps to Unix nirvana“.
- FreeBSD now ships with clang. (via) I know DragonFly (mostly?) works with clang… Could we switch?
- “hwstat” will gain DragonFly support soon.
- Firmware for ral(4) has been added by Joe Talbott.
- Thomas Klausner has a writeup of some project ideas or goals taken from the recent pkgsrcCon. A followup has me thinking: if the -uu option updates dependent packages with pkg_add, does that mean ‘pkg_radd -uu packagename” will do all updating possible based on available binary packages? Worth trying.
06/11/2010
BSD links plz
I did some cleanup on the various BSD links I have on the sidebar of this site; are there any sites I’m missing? I’d like to be as complete as possible. Please supply URLs.
(Be warned that some messages may not show up immediately because links in comments will rarely trigger the spamfilter – I’ll check for them.)
Facebook and DragonFly, but not on purpose
Looking for DragonFly BSD in Google will occasionally turn up wierd things: the release ISOs scattered amongst other not-so-free software, or poorly cut-and-pasted documentation in a splog. This is the oddest recently: a direct copy of the Wikipedia page on DragonFly, placed on Facebook, with a big tag at the top saying “Sign up for Facebook to connect with DragonFly BSD”.
Except there’s no DragonFly on Facebook. I assume it’s a group formed by some Facebook user. The whole “sign up to connect” item rankles me a bit; signing up for Facebook isn’t going to get you more DragonFly; it’s just going to waste your time.
Welcome new commiter: Venkatesh Srinivas
Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.
06/10/2010
Specific steps for multiprocessing
Matthew Dillon’s outlined the exact steps for converting to coarse locking, and he’s looking for volunteers to convert files, according to the guidelines he described. If you’re looking for maybe two hours of work that would make a big difference, here’s your chance.
New BSDTalk: clang clang clang
BSDTalk has a very timely interview with Roman Divácký and Ed Schouten about the switch to clang/LLVM in FreeBSD. It’s 17 minutes, recorded at the recent BSDCan 2010.
06/09/2010
Holy crap, 4,000 posts!
This technically is the 4,001st post. The Twitter feed is read far more than I expected, too.
I’ll update the layout to celebrate.
Recompile again, plus multiprocessing details
Matthew Dillon’s made changes again that require a full world and kernel rebuild, if you’re following the bleeding edge. There’s also discussion of the underlying principles of the token-based multiprocessor work he’s planning.
06/08/2010
Standards: we got ‘em
They may be low, but Sascha Wildner has documented them.
(I am making a joke that probably only makes sense to native English speakers. Sorry.)
06/07/2010
More pcc notes
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
06/06/2010
Structure changes means recompilation
If you’re running DragonFly 2.7, you will need to do a full rebuild on your next update. Matthew Dillon has made some changes because of his lwkt_token work. Making parts of DragonFly subsystems multi-processor safe should be much easier now.
Extra DNS tools
Jan Lentfer has committed ldns and drill to DragonFly, in (unlikely) chance that you managed to delete BIND from pkgsrc (installed by default on 2.7+) and somehow couldn’t replace it.
06/04/2010
Mandoc, mdocml, and usage
There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
06/03/2010
How to get more wireless drivers
Joe Talbott wants to write DragonFly/BSD drivers for a whole slew of wireless devices. These are also all the adapters he doesn’t physically have. You can fix this by purchasing something off that page, which will ship right to him. A bwi(4) driver is next, for instance.
bmake(1)ing a list, checking it twice
I found this reference list of targets for bmake very useful, especially because I can never remember them all. Unfortunately, the site where it’s located appears to be going away at the end of the month, but it should resurface on a new NetBSD wiki.
06/01/2010
BSDTalk 190: Michael Lucas
BSDTalk 190 has 20 minutes of conversation with Michael Lucas, one of my favorite authors, about his new book, “Network Flow Analysis“. He is also responsible for other BSD books.
June OSBR: Growing Business
The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and it has a number of articles about growth and open source. It’s a mix of “how-to” and “how-we-did” articles.
