DragonFly BSD Digest » FreeBSD

BSDTalk 211: Deb Goodkin

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 21:27:00 +0000

Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation gets 24 minutes of interview on BSDTalk.

NFS fixes, too

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:36:05 +0000

Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD apparently improve NFS write performance, though I don’t have numbers to show.

A pile of sh and pam fixes

Justin Sherrill — Mon, 26 Dec 2011 19:30:00 +0000

Peter Avalos added an avalanche of updates for PAM and sh, so I’ll link to a few of them. The changes are mostly sourced from FreeBSD. The PAM changes remove pam_krb5 and pam_ksu, for which there’s an alternative.

FreeBSD Foundation end of year donations

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 07 Dec 2011 03:24:22 +0000

The FreeBSD Foundation is putting out their end of year donation notice. Donate if you can; the support for active developers there helps everyone.

Being a good BSD neighbor

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 29 Nov 2011 23:28:40 +0000

Adrian Chadd showed up on the DragonFly kernel@ mailing list, offering some help in keeping things compatible with FreeBSD and 802.11 networking. That’s quite neighborly of him, especially since his hands are already pretty full.

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/02

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 02 Oct 2011 16:17:21 +0000

Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.

DragonFly morphology. The insect, not the operating system, though that would make an interesting diagram.
Stick your pinkie in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style, and say, “One MEEELion TCP connections on BSD!“. (via several retweets)
Sudo vs. SSH public keys.
The app store concept is taking over. Not that it’s a totally bad thing! We could implement one for pkgsrc, and should. (via)
A nice (OpenBSD-centric) walkthrough of routing. (via)
Ooh, decent disk benchmarks. I wish there were graphs, of course.
I think this happens to most CS grads; you sit around one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I could write an operating system!” This forum post shows someone getting that idea and then realizing it’s not necessarily the goal he wanted. Why do I link to it? I appreciate the optimism.
Or you can just build a functioning computer in Minecraft. This sort of thing has been happening for a while – this movie is just a link to the craziest example I’ve seen so far.

Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration. Not a comic, but still visually interesting.

A zillion sh updates

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:46:16 +0000

Peter Avalos brought in a vast quantity of sh(1) updates, all from FreeBSD as far as I can tell. There’s a whole bunch more commits all on 8/21, but I’m tired of linking. Thank you, Peter!

New HighPoint RocketRAID support

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 00:38:46 +0000

If you have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4321 or 4322 model, Sascha Wildner’s just added support for them in the hptiop(4) driver, taken from FreeBSD.

Starve reads or starve writes?

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 21 Jul 2011 22:22:59 +0000

Remember the benchmark tests I linked a few days ago? There’s been ongoing discussion about them, and a recent comment from Matthew Dillon sums it up pretty well: the benchmarks differ depending on whether you favor reads, or favor writes.

Blogbench and Areca RAID tests

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 12 Jul 2011 02:52:20 +0000

Francois Tigeot tested a system under both FreeBSD and DragonFly using various RAID setups with arcmsr(4) and blogbench. Hooray for graphs! Like any good benchmark, it quickly went to discussion of how the test was conducted and how the various runs differ. (Follow the thread.)

Summer of Code DragonFly projects announced

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 26 Apr 2011 00:21:22 +0000

Google’s announced the accepted projects for 2011. DragonFly has 6 slots!

We had a large number of interesting project proposals; far more than than the slots available. If you’re one of the students who did not get in, please consider working on your project as time allows. I know it won’t be lucrative, but I’d still like to see them happen.

Here’s the list of accepted projects:

Implementing a mirror target for device mapper: Adam Hoka, mentored by Joe Talbott
Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy: Brills Peng, mentored by Alex Hornung
Make vkernels checkpointable: Irina Presa, mentored by Venkatesh Srinivas
Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD: nickprok, mentored by Nathaniel Filardo
Bring kernel event notification in DragonFly BSD to its logical conclusion: Samuel J. Greear, mentored by Sascha Wildner
Porting Virtio Drivers from NetBSD to DragonFly BSD to speed up DragonFly BSD as a KVM guest: Stéphanie Ouillon, mentored by Pratyush Kshirsagar

BSD Magazine: ZFS

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 18 Feb 2011 02:14:23 +0000

February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.

sh updates

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 13 Feb 2011 01:06:56 +0000

Peter Avalos went looking for updates to /bin/sh, and found a lot of them, including regression tests. Even though sh is… 15 years old? Older? It dates back to BSD 4.4 and before – anyway, it’s been around forever, but there’s still things to do with it.

tws(4) added

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 09 Jan 2011 16:12:49 +0000

Sascha Wildner is continuing his huge driver-adding streak, this time with tws(4). It’s a port of the FreeBSD driver, for “LSI 3ware 9750 series SATA/SAS RAID controllers”. The commit message has a list of individual models, and further credits.

aac(4) update

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 08 Jan 2011 18:28:00 +0000

Sascha Wildner continues the driver update streak, bringing in the updated FreeBSD version of the aac(4) driver. This adds support for 40+ Adaptec AdvancedRAID cards – the aac(4) man page has a very long list.

hptmv(4) added

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 06 Jan 2011 03:07:52 +0000

Sascha Wildner’s added the hptmv(4) driver, for Highpoint RocketRAID 182x cards. It comes from Highpoint/FreeBSD.

NYCBSDCon surplus

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 04:14:48 +0000

Apparently the surplus money from the recent NYCBSDCon is going to each of the BSD projects. Great news! Now, what to do with it…

HighPoint RocketRAID support

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 10 Dec 2010 02:25:33 +0000

Sascha Wildner’s been on a RAID rampage lately, adding a lot of drivers. The latest is hptiop(4), which supports many of (all?) the HighPoint RocketRAID series.

BSD Show!: Jon Hixson

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 26 Oct 2010 01:30:52 +0000

The BSD Show! has a 20-minute interview with John Hixson, known for working on pc-sysinstall. (See also)

KMS and GEM work, for cash

Justin Sherrill — Sat, 23 Oct 2010 01:58:19 +0000

There’s still no support for KMS/GEM on any most BSDs, though there are people interested in it for FreeBSD. One of DragonFly’s Summer of Code projects was just that, though it’s not in a state where it can be really used.