MirBSD is apparently also interested in pkgsrc as an alternative to the exclusive-to-MirBSD Mirports. The more the merrier, I say.
Month: December 2010
re(4) support expanded
Tim Bisson put together support for the RealTek 8168E network card, under the re(4) driver. It’s in DragonFly now.
12/28/2010
No more EISA
Another bus bites the dust: EISA is no more on DragonFly. I don’t know if there’s even any system that DragonFly could boot on and would use this. Still, remove your hats and enjoy a moment of silence.
12/27/2010
Pkgsrc 2010Q4 coming soon
The planned freeze is underway; so pkgsrc-2010Q4 should arrive soon. How soon? January 1st, if it’s by the traditional schedule.
27c3: Everyone is going
Apparently there’s a lot of DragonFly people going to the 27th Chaos Communication Congress. Of course, I don’t know if there’s any tickets left at this point.
12/25/2010
Crazy x86-64 crash fixed
Matthew Dillon fixed a rare and difficult-to-find bug on x86-64 Dragonfly. This means much more of the system can be run ‘MPSAFE’, or without the Giant Lock. Watch for this soon if you’re running 2.9.
BSD Magazine: WebDAV
The latest(?) version of BSD Magazine is out. Among other things, it has an intro to pkgsrc. The site lists November 2010 for this issue, but it just showed up on the Twitter feed, so I’m not totally sure I have this right. In any case, it’s a free download.
12/23/2010
Google Code-In, and sysctls too
Ed Smith was thinking of working on sysctl documentation, but as it turns out, a lot of it has already been done via Google Code-In; Samuel Greear recently committed a lot of it. (Though there’s more sysctl work possible.)
While on that topic, Samuel Greear also posted a lengthy summary of all the Code-In work done so far. We need more code-related tasks! The existing ones have been so popular that they’re all getting done, quickly.
New reference count – it’s super!
Venkatesh Srinivas has created what he calls “Super Light Weight Reference Counting”, which he describes in a recent post, plus followup. He’s already converted sfbuf to use it.
12/22/2010
TCP panic possible
Sepherosa Ziehau recently made a change in TCP handling that could cause a panic. If you get it to happen, he wants to know about it. This only applies to people running bleeding edge DragonFly as of a few days ago.
LSI Fusion-MPT 2 SAS controller support
Sascha Wildner has continued his driver-adding run, bringing in mps(4). This supports various LSI Logic SAS controllers, taken from FreeBSD. Support isn’t complete or tested, but it’s enough to start with.
12/21/2010
Virtio driver progress
Tim Bisson posted a note on the progress he and Pratyush have made on a virtio driver for DragonFly, ported from NetBSD. This is for use in virtualized environments; his post links to graphs (yay!) that show the performance improvement over emulated IDE. His note also links to the code and documentation.
12/20/2010
Miscellaneous 48-core details
As Matthew Dillon works on supporting his new 48-core system, he’s written some notes on power usage and scheduling/drivers that may be worth a read.
libarchive updated
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.8.4. The commit message has details on what’s changed (for us). This is good, since the libarchive site release notes seems to not be up to date.
Update: Peter helpfully pointed at contrib/libarchive/NEWS.
12/19/2010
Thanks, JMicron
Sepherosa Ziehau fixed a clock issue with the JMicron JMC250/JMC260 chipset, used with the jme(4) driver, and apparently JMicron helped out with hardware for testing this fix. So, thanks, Sephe, and thanks, JMicron! (buy their stuff)
Watch out for scheduler changes
Bleeding-edge DragonFly may suffer some instability issues; Matthew Dillon is making scheduler changes to accomodate larger numbers of CPUs. On the other hand: yay, better performance!
pf 4.4 ready for testing
Jan Lentfer’s got the 4.4 version of pf ready for testing. Filtering, queuing, redirection, NAT – all working. It has to be built into your kernel, though that’s all of 3 lines of work. Download his branch and try it.
12/16/2010
LOCALPATCHES a possibility
I never really noticed this before, but it’s possible to include your own patchsets into pkgsrc and have them picked up as part of the build process, using $LOCALPATCHES.
12/15/2010
Updates for zlib, tnftp
Peter Avalos has updated zlib to version 1.25, and appears to have done some work with tnftp, though this is the only message I saw.
Ironically, I get a “this site is using an unsupported form of compression” error when browsing to the zlib web site.
Encrypted root disk notes
Tim Darby asked some questions about setting up an encrypted root disk; Alex Hornung answered them. They apply to people running current DragonFly, not 2.8, but if you’re wanting to try it, why not?
12/13/2010
Less is more, really
If you were dying to have less behave like more, it’s possible to do so with these tips from Oliver Fromme. I don’t know if it’s that desirable, but it’s an interesting thing.
Lazy Reading: Lots and lots of it
Somehow I ended up with a zillion links for this week’s Lazy Reading. I hope you’ve got some spare time for this… Let’s get right into it:
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author (see links on site), has started Twittering. He’s also found the Wikileaks/NetBSD association that I didn’t know about, as Julian Assange even shows up in the NetBSD fortunes file. Also, while linking to his blog, I’ll point at his post on “Write what you don’t know“. Think of that article next time you feel you don’t know enough to contribute to something – especially open source.
- There’s a lengthy dialog on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list about pkgsrc, and “Making it easier to get and use pkgsrc“. You can follow the whole thread on the listing page. I am all for the idea. Everybody and their brother has an App Store these days. Ports/pkgsrc are perhaps the original app store ideas, and I’d like to see them brought to the same level as these commercial entitites. This is important: pkgsrc is perhaps the only app store equivalent in existence that is not tied to a platform; that exists only to get you software rather than to provide a way to tie a platform into its developers profits.
- Hey, a roguelike zombie apocalypse game! Aw, it’s Windows-only.
- Mikel King has an editorial that sums up the many places BSD serves as an underpinning to products – a good checklist, if you don’t know of them. He’s also written an instructional article on passwordless/SSH setup.
- Along the same lines, Promote Perl by Building Great Things. This applies to BSD products too; telling people it’s great doesn’t work as well as making something great and showing that a BSD system is part of what makes it so.
- Did you know there are even BSD Certification classes in Iran? I really need to do that… though probably not at that location.
- Yacc is not dead. (via) I link to this because I had a moment of nerd excitement realizing that blog’s title is intended to look like a bang path.
- Database design ideas. There’s been a good series of posts there lately, good for anyone wanting to move beyond the basic CRUD details.
12/11/2010
Vkernel speedup
As part of the ongoing work to support a lot of CPUs, Matthew Dillon has made some changes that have the side effect of benefiting virtual kernels. How much? I don’t have a benchmark, yet.
OpenSSL update
Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to 1.0.0c, to fix a recent security problem. The problem doesn’t sound too catastrophic to my untrained ear, at least.
12/10/2010
Even more CPUs and RAM
Matthew Dillon has moved CPU support to 63 processors and 512G of RAM. This may cause issues, he warns. It’s also just barely working, so don’t expect to go into production with half a terabyte of RAM in the next few days.
Google Code-In so far
Samuel Greear wrote up a nice summation of Google Code-In progress. 30+ tasks are done now, which is great! Except! We need more projects, as we’re about halfway through the total. Suggestions are welcome, here or on the mailing lists. Recently finished projects include a devattr tool and vkernel usage documentation.
Horrible accident and other errors
Tim Darby had an error with a particular AMD AHCI chipset, and the entertaining error was:
Attempting to reinitialize the port after it had a horrible accident
This gives me a chance to link to one of my favorite error messages ever.
(The chipset works in current DragonFly, by the way.)
24 spare CPUs, anyone?
Matthew Dillon has made it possible to boot DragonFly on 24-CPU systems. Also, we’re currently limited to 32G of RAM. Oh, to have such limitations; I was considering myself lucky to have 4 CPUs.
12/07/2010
JDK progress
Francois Tigeot has wip/jdk15 working for DragonFly/x86_64. It’s not there yet for i386…
GCI work continues: sysctls
There’s now descriptions for a number of the net.inet.* sysctls, thanks to Taras Klaskovsky as part of Google Code-In.
12/06/2010
A super-simple install
I was reading this Perl Advent Calendar (that would be good for DragonFly, come to think of it) post about ack, and came across a interesting line:
curl http://betterthangrep.com/ack-standalone > ~/bin/ack && chmod 0755 !#:3'
fetch’ would work just as well on a BSD system. The interesting thing is that it’s a one-liner for installing software that doesn’t make any assumptions about having an existing framework like pkgsrc or aptitude or anything like that – it just grabs the code and plops it in place. It wouldn’t work for more complex software, but the simplicity is intriguing, to match the Unix-like single, chainable program idea.
For those who haven’t seen it, ‘ack‘ is a grep replacement that automatically takes care of common activities around searching – skipping files that would cause duplicate matches, binary files, etc., handles a larger range of regular expressions, and runs startlingly fast.
Swapcache benefits
Tim Darby was looking to take advantage of swapcache, and got some advice from Matthew Dillon. This led to a larger writeup that went into the mechanics and advantages of both swapcache and SSDs. The swapcache(8) page has been expanded with these notes, and I’m sure I need to buy a SSD for my next upgrade.
SSD devices have tumbled into the sub-$100 range for smaller devices; they are perfect for swapcache if you’ve got the spare SATA connector…
12/05/2010
ProFTPd upgrade
If you have net/proftpd installed, and you installed it in the last week or so, you may want to upgrade. There’s been a security problem with the source files.
Lazy reading: numbers, servers, things
So, informal poll time: do people like these Lazy Reading roundups?
- Numbers everyone should know. (via) I link to this cause it’s interesting, and because it shows something else. If you understand what these numbers mean, congratulations. You speak a language that a limited number of people on this planet can understand. Think about that for a bit.
- The end of a faithful server. (via) I can sympathize. Run any computer for some number of years without any issues, and you’ll miss it when it’s gone.
- A simple explanation for ‘git reset –hard’. Some chunks of git are magical, in that I know they work but the internal behavior is still opaque to me. It may be best to keep it that way.
- I do gain a perverse sense of pride that DragonFly is an all-volunteer organization. Linux, on the other hand, is mostly a corporate product. (via) I realize this is not a legitimate thing, and I’d love having enough of a market that someone could be paid to work on DragonFly.
- Hey, the Economist Magazine’s Babbage blog is pretty good. I like this recent article about the Eye-Fi, a device I tell people about whenever I can. It essentially erases the need for storage on your camera. The last paragraph in the Babbage entry is also a little bit important.
12/04/2010
SHA256 for passwords
Another Google Code-In task completed: passwords are now created using SHA256 (PDF link) by default, and libcrypt also now supports SHA512.
Visual update for bugs
Courtesy of another Google Code-In project, bugs.dragonflybsd.org now matches the main Dragonfly website.
12/03/2010
amr(4) update
Sascha Wildner has added even more RAID controller support, from FreeBSD, this time in improvements to the amr(4) driver. Check the green lines in this man page diff to see what’s new.
2.8 Installation Video
Another piece of work by one of the fine students participating in Google Code-In is a new 2.8 installation screencast/video. Check it out at the following link:
DragonFly BSD 2.8 Installation Screencast on YouTube
If you have been following along but have not yet tried DragonFly, this should evidence how easy it is — wait not a second longer!
12/02/2010
Google Code-In progress
The Google Code-In projects for DragonFly are bearing fruit, as there’s new pages in the new handbook, plus code commits from various finished projects. 14 tasks are done, and there’s 10 more in progress, out of… I think 50? This is a good rate, considering there’s more than a month left.
NYCBSDCon video
There’s a minute and a half of video up of NYCBSDCon 2010, showing off the nice facilities, food, and some of the talks. (via) You can see me shifting around in my seat at 1:28.
December OSBR: Humanitarian open source
The December theme for the Open Source Business Resource is “Humanitarian Open Source”. It sounds somewhat ethereal, but the articles actually concentrate on achieving concrete targets. Plus, more microfinance!
