I posted before about changes to the commit template for DragonFly, but Alex Hornung has written up exactly what he did, with better details on how to use it.
Month: June 2011
Intel networking updates
Sepherosa Ziehau has been committing a bunch of changes for em/emx(4) and bce(4). You may have hardware that has suddenly become supported, for instance. Also, credit is due to David Christensen and Broadcom for sending hardware to test out.
06/27/2011
Xen ports, and support for it
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado really wants a port of DragonFly to Xen. He can’t do it himself, but he did a nice job of writing up the problem, and even found resources to help any developer wanting to take on this task.
BSDTalk 206:Peter Losher and ISC
BSDTalk 206 is 17 minutes with Peter Losher of the Internet Software Consortium. I don’t think people realize how much ISC does…
06/26/2011
Lazy Reading for 2011/06/26
Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here. Go figure.
- Who doesn’t like the taste of BSD? Mmm, delicious.
- “redundant array of inexpensive crap”
- The invention of email. (via, via) It predates Unix.
- The worst ‘hacking’ scenes ever. (via) Starts funny, then you get angry.
- A nice explanation of the Lorenz Attractor, which I had only ever experienced as a screen saver. (via)
- Possibly the smallest roguelike ever.
06/25/2011
A change for committers, a change for pkgsrc
Two completely separate and unrelated changes:
First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found. MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.
Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped. Speak up if you need them to stick around.
06/24/2011
Mail issues for @dragonflybsd.org
If you’ve had a lack of emails from the DragonFly mailing lists lately, this SORBS listing event might be why.
06/23/2011
Instructions for iwi(4)
Do you have a Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG, 2225BG, or 2915ABG wireless card? The driver is iwi(4). It requires a kernel module and some downloadable firmware, which makes it slightly more troublesome to set up. Luckily, ‘ferz’ has written up just how to get it working.
06/21/2011
Donation credit where it’s due
Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’. Thanks, Jeremy!
Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers… but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests. Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against? Here’s the moment to note that.
GSoC: virtio status
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
06/20/2011
Someone try the new bootstrap
Pkgsrc bmake bootstrap, that is. There’s a new version of bmake, and it needs to be tested on every platform possible.
06/19/2011
Lazy Reading for 2011/06/19
A light week. School’s nearly out in the States, so I expect the Internets to be quieter.
- Another open-source compiler suite. Maybe parts of it were open before? I don’t know; all I have to go on is a press release. Remember when there was GCC or nothing?
- Read this; it will show you just how amazingly intricate the Telehack project is. If that doesn’t convince you, read this.
- Incomplete man pages are no fun. Not this bad, but close.
- Do you use PuTTY as a SSH client on Windows? This PuTTY shortcut creator may be really handy. It also saves your settings in a sane location, instead of buried somewhere in the registry as PuTTY does.
- The origin of Pong. (via) It debunks some of the legends.
06/18/2011
AHCI/SSD issue fixed
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.
Padlock warning
Do you have a Via CPU? Do you use padlock(4)? (The driver for cryptographic functions, which Via processors support with hardware acceleration) Alex Hornung made some untested changes to support the hardware random number generator, but he needs people to test it.
06/17/2011
BSDCan audio now available
Audio recordings of the events at BSDCan 2011 are now available, in mp3 form. If the file names aren’t descriptive enough, you can go through the speaker list and match up. (found indirectly via Facebook)
Freeze for pkgsrc-2011Q2 coming up
The pkgsrc ‘freeze’ in preparation for the pkgsrc-2011Q2 branch is coming up, starting this Sunday the 19th. This means the quarterly release will be tagged in about 2 weeks, and I’ll probably have binary packages built for DragonFly about a week or so after that.
06/16/2011
BSDDay Argentina 2011
BSDDay Argentina is starting to look for speakers. The official site doesn’t list 2011 dates yet, but it’ll be in November, in Buenos Aires. (via Damian Vicino) Alex Hornung gave a DragonFly presentation there last year…
06/14/2011
DESTDIR almost done
There’s still a few packages in pkgsrc that don’t support DESTDIR (e.g. being built by someone other than root). If you want to help out, here’s a list of those 60 packages.
06/12/2011
Lazy reading for 2011/06/12
A nice big pile of links this week. Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.
- An interview with Dennis Richie about inventing Unix. (via) I like that he sounds just absolutely tickled that there’s a version of ‘his’ operating system on his phone.
- A nice article describing Project Euler, for those who want to program; or program more. (via several places)
- Michael Lucas points out something that isn’t new but still needs reinforcement: avoid SSH1.
- Anecdotal evidence that SSD drives fail a lot. On the other hand, the bulk builds I’ve done of pkgsrc have worked the crap out of several SSDs and I haven’t killed a single one.
- Weird things in IPv6 routing. (indirectly via this, via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd IRC)
- Aw, Google’s BSD-specific search page is gone. Not that it was really needed at this point; I hadn’t seen a difference in the search results for some time. There’s more pressing issues.
- The FreeBSD Foundation has a trip report from Sergio Ligregni and from Thomas Abthorpe, from sponsored trips to BSDCan 2011. I’d encourage everyone to make it to a BSD convention – it’s energizing to see others working on BSD, in person.
- I don’t think you really need a guide for this. (via)
- Emacs user at work.
- Totally unrelated: best dubstep video ever.
06/11/2011
August OSBR open
The Open Source Business Resource magazine is going with a rare unthemed issue in August. So, this is your chance to get published on your own specific business/open source topic! Articles are due by July 10th.
06/10/2011
Watch out for VM work
Venkatesh Srinivas is making vmobj_token and vm_token much more fine-grained. That’s great, but watch out over the next few weeks as this work goes into 2.11. (i.e. don’t upgrade your DragonFly 2.11 unless you are ready for surprises.) Venkatesh has already found some.
06/09/2011
Who’s listening?
Do you have a DragonFly workstation? That you play audio on? Do you have headphones hooked up? Is it using Intel High Definition Audio? (snd_hda) Does connecting the headphones disable the system speaker?
You can probably guess exactly what I’m trying to troubleshoot given the above questions.
06/08/2011
Two SSD things
Here’s two items I meant to post and for some reason did not:
- Sven Gaerner posted a short description of how he migrated his DragonFly system from a hard disk to a SSD. This may be useful for anyone considering a move. Decent-sized SSDs are reaching low prices these days.
- Tim Bisson posted an update on his work on TRIM support for DragonFly. The code is available now if you’re feeling lucky.
06/07/2011
Time to try IPv6
It’s World IPv6 Day. You can go to IPv6 right now with your DragonFly system. If your ISP doesn’t support IPv6, you can try a sixxs or HE tunnel. Also, nag your ISP about it.
OSBR: Technology Entrepreneurship (again)
The newest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this being a second issue on Technology Entrepreneurship.
06/06/2011
i386, LAPIC, IOAPIC
The i386 architecture now supports LAPIC and I/O APIC. If you had weird interrupt problems when installing DragonFly before, now might be a good time to try the latest bleeding-edge version of DragonFly and see if the problem vanished.
06/05/2011
Lazy Reading for 2011/06/05
Short but good this week.
- I always enjoy seeing other people’s window configs, even if I don’t use them.
- The CCBY license is very similar to the BSD license – and there’s some big institutions using it. That is good news for everyone.
- I linked to telehack before, but I didn’t realize how huge it was. There’s 25,000 virtual hosts in there, recreated from history, complete with realistic user lists. You can ‘hack’ into hosts, or run games and BASIC files. (hammurabi!) It even recreates early USENET. Read the description of what to do – it gets really interesting about halfway down. It’s an Internet Simulation, if ever there was one. (via)
- Remember I posted earlier this week about my results with deduplication? I had about a 7% gain of the disk. As time has gone on and the Hammer reblocker was able to work overnight, I’m now up to a gain of 10%. Neat!
- Also: I got Minecraft working (as a server) on DragonFly. See the comments on my original it’s-almost-working post.
- RAS Syndrome: Recursive Acronym Syndrome Syndrome. For anyone who has typed “GNU”. (via)
06/04/2011
BSDTalk 205: Josh Paetzel and FreeNAS
BSDTalk has a 17-minute interview with Josh Paetzel about FreeNAS 8. Every time Will Backman makes it to a convention with a tape recorder, we all benefit.
06/03/2011
Say hello to LAPIC and IOAPIC, single processor
Sepherosa Ziehau’s made it possible for uniprocessor kernels to use the LAPIC and IOAPIC functions on x86_64, which means better timer support, less need to fiddle with configs, and more supported hardware. A win all around! Set hw.lapic_enable=”0″ if there’s trouble. The same changes for i386 are on the way.
dragonflybsd.org renumbering
The dragonflybsd.org network is going through some network changes; access may be spotty in the next… 24 hours?
06/02/2011
BSD Magazine: NanoBSD and Alix
The June issue of BSD Magazine is out, with the title being “NanoBSD and Alix”, but there’s plenty more articles in there. DragonFly news is on page 25 – if this month is better for me than last month, I hope to have more in there.
06/01/2011
Virtio block driver progress
Stéphanie Ouillon has posted extensive details on the Virtio Google Summer of Code project; a few questions are included for anyone who wants to jump in and offer feedback.
+1 for the site
I added a Google “+1″ button to the site, over on the right. Not that the site really needs it, but it tickles me that they’re using an old (but still in use) meme for this idea. I’d link to places it was used on our own DragonFly mailing lists, but searching for “+1″ isn’t working too well.
