DragonFly BSD Digest » DragonFly

Summer of Code and DragonFly: who is interested?

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 01:57:06 +0000

Google has announced that Summer of Code 2012 is in the works. I’ve announced that DragonFly will apply again. For that, I need to know who wants to be a student or a mentor, and what ideas people want to suggest.

GCC 4.6 now possible

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 01:02:40 +0000

John Marino has made it possible to build world and kernel on DragonFly using GCC 4.6 in the form of gnat-aux. (We’re currently on GCC version 4.4) Note that version 4.6 isn’t included with DragonFly, so you would need to download and compile ~~GCC 4.6~~ a very recent version of lang/gnat-aux, and set CCVER=gcc46 before building world and kernel to try this out.

Update: John Marino points out in comments that you need to set WORLD_CCVER, not CCVER as his original message said.

Google Summer of Code 2012 announced

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 19:51:49 +0000

It’s on, again! Not that there was any doubt. I need to collect potential mentor names before DragonFly can be involved, so you can guess what I’ll say next…

Odd DVD drive issue

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:16:44 +0000

Edward Berger found that using a LG/Hitachi DVD drive kept him from successfully booting a DragonFly install CD. Using other manufacturers worked out fine. What causes the problem? I don’t know, but it’s worth mentioning it out loud in case someone else gets bit by it.

NetBSD Hackathon, February 10-12

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 04:12:54 +0000

There’s a NetBSD Hackathon going on February 10th through 12th, mostly online. I mention this because it may have some effect on pkgsrc, used by both NetBSD and DragonFly. Hackathons for pkgsrc usually happen separately, but no harm in keeping an eye out for any positive benefits.

ISDN really gone

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 04:43:08 +0000

ISDN support has been removed from DragonFly. It was not useful at this point, because it’s rarely used any more. It does make me feel a little sad; this was the technology everyone said was the future before cable modems and DSL were figured out.

3.0 Release Candidate images

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 20:22:55 +0000

They are located in the normal place, in .img (USB) and .iso (CD/DVD) formats. I haven’t made the desktop DVD yet; let’s see how these untested versions do…

http://avalon.dragonflybsd.org/iso-images/

Libpcap, tcpdump updated

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 02:47:47 +0000

Peter Avalos updated libpcap and tcpdump. This is on master, not the 3.0 branch.

Old ATA also out

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 01:02:53 +0000

A bit of symmetry in that title, there. Old ATA, which was replaced years ago, is finally gone. This should affect nobody…

Do you use ISDN?

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 26 Jan 2012 00:54:34 +0000

If you need to use ISDN with DragonFly, speak up now. I think it may get tossed otherwise.

DragonFly 3.0 branched

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 23:22:41 +0000

Note that it’s branched, not released. I’m building and uploading binary pkgsrc packages for it now, and hope to have a ‘release candidate’ very soon. This is the prep work before the release, really. There’s a catchall ticket for tracking remaining work.

Want to support newer Intel GPUs?

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 21:56:06 +0000

There’s a whopping 250 euro bounty up now on the DragonFly Code Bounties page. It’s for supporting the newer Intel video chipsets, and there’s already examples in FreeBSD to start with.

(David Shao, where are you? If you’re reading this, hop into #dragonflybsd and tell us how things are going with your GEM/KMS work)

Live deduplication marked experimental

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 21:11:37 +0000

‘Live dedup’, where a DragonFly system makes a deduplicative reference to copied data instead of actually copying the data, is now off by default. There’s no definite issue linked to it yet that I know of, but it never hurts to be careful just before a release.

OpenSSL updated

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 21 Jan 2012 20:07:01 +0000

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 1.0.0g. It’s so new I can’t find anything in the OpenSSL changelog to describe why there was an update, but I suspect it was this.

RELRO in a BSD

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 23:44:18 +0000

John Marino has added support for RELRO in DragonFly, which makes it the first BSD to have it. That’s great news! What is it? Apparently a guard against memory corruption or overflow in the linker. His commit message gives better details.

Security problem and a fix

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 21:38:43 +0000

Matthias Schmidt found a discussion about DragonFly’s password encryption. The result, if I am reading it correctly, is that brute-forcing the password from available hashes is quicker than it should be. Matthias also found a contributed fix. Samuel Greear updated to match the reference SHA implementation also in Linux, with this very pertinent warning.

If you liked KDE3, you’ll like this

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:50:19 +0000

If you liked KDE3, you may like Trinity. Matthias Drochner would like you to help get it in pkgsrc.

How low can you go? (with RAM and Hammer)

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 21:41:55 +0000

Matthew Dillon has a very detailed commit message with changes to make sure Hammer will run overnight cleanups in situations as low as 256M of RAM. I think you can find that much RAM in breakfast cereal boxes these days.

How long until DragonFly 3.0?

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 22:56:26 +0000

The answer is “not very”. As I wrote in a post to kernel@, DragonFly 3.0 will be tagged soon, and released when there’s pkgsrc-2011Q4 packages to go with it. Probably a week if everything goes to plan.

Building JDK 1.6, maybe 1.7

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 20:38:56 +0000

Chris Turner reports success building JDK 1.6 on DragonFly x86_64, though it requires a bit of fiddling. Building 1.7 on x86_64 is getting closer but not yet, as far as I can tell.