It’s been possible for some time to automatically check for vulnerabilities in installed pkgsrc packages.  However, it requires some initial setup work.  NetBSD now will check automatically if there’s any packages installed.  The same feature could work in DragonFly – I have a post about that even links to the appropriate changes.  Someone want to take this on?

Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9).  This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.

I draw attention to this not because it changed anything with the games in a functional sense, but because it’s huge (450 files changed, 31450 insertions(+), 29998 deletions(-)) and because it came out of nowhere.  It’s always nice to have new surprise contributions arrive.

It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.

• Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE.  This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too…
• pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel.  Will it work for other BSDs?  I hope so, eventually.
• The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 – give if you get a chance.  Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets?  I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
• Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video.  (via)  Kernighan’s book, “The Practice of Programming“, with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.

Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist.  And he used DragonFly!

Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play.  Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld?

Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly – I am a big fan of that idea.

top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.

Where I get more linkbloggy than usual:

• According to the 5th slide in this presentation, Android’s libc, “Bionic”, is BSD-derived.  Anyone know which BSD?  It looks like “whatever” is the answer.
• There’s a video out about BSD Certification.
• Hubert Feyrer has a note about NetBSD’s not-necessarily-intended moves towards a microkernel architecture.  Other “move things to userland” steps have happened in DragonFly; it seems a trend.
• Giorgos Keramidas talks about font substitution in Firefox.  This should work on any platform.
• Vim plugins: a.vim lets you switch between .c and .h files with a single command.
• I should have linked to this yesterday: Epitome, a “deduplication engine” for OpenBSD, was mentioned a bit in the most recent BSDTalk.  (via)
• Gopher: not dead yet. (also via)

Johannes Hofmann has taken over estd, a “frequency scaling daemon for NetBSD and DragonFly”.   The newest release brings multicore support on DragonFly.

Stathis Kamperis has ported POSIX message queues to DragonFly (from NetBSD) and has his eyes set on veriexec next.

Stathis Kamperis, as part of his Summer of Code work, ported NetBSD’s POSIX message queues to DragonFly.  He has a writeup of all the details, and even has test cases!  It should be showing up in 2.5 soon.

Hubert Feyrer, for his PhD, put together a Virtual Unix Lab – a whole lab of  NetBSD systems for teaching System Administration.  It’s a good strategy for an environment where some percentage of the systems will be irretrievably mangled.  It’s available as a book.

NetBSD now has a Projects Blog and a Twitter account.  I’m not taking credit for the idea, but I do note a definite similarity between that and the DragonFly Digest, to which I say: quick, someone do this for FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD!  More attention to all the BSD work being done is positive.

Daniel Lorch is working on a port of Hammer to Linux’s VFS, though since he’s using FUSE, it will be able to reach other systems, like NetBSD.  The code is accessible.

There is, of course, DragonFly project ideas for Google’s Summer of Code.  There are also idea pages up for FreeBSD and NetBSD, both also participating this year.

Nikita Glukhov is porting tmpfs from FreeBSD/NetBSD, and is looking for some feedback.

I’ve wanted tmpfs or something similar for a while; I have a reoccurring (if not quite realistic) fantasy of building a system with a ridiculous amount of RAM and using it as a disk.

BSDTalk has Andrew Doran of NetBSD talking about the not-yet-out NetBSD 5 release, for 22 minutes.

“Desktop NetBSD” – with the DragonFly LiveDVD and installer, we’re almost able to do the same thing now – a skim of that project page seems to imply we just need to add some more packages.  (via)

A vulnerability in telnetd code common to FreeBSD and DragonFly was just discovered; it’s been fixed in DragonFly using code from NetBSD in 1995, strangely enough.  (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)

This has been all over the Intarwebs at this point, but: there’s a good rumor that the next Sidekick phone will be running NetBSD on the inside.  Danger, the company that makes the Sidekick, was bought by Microsoft, which makes this a BSD-based phone produced by Microsoft.  I never thought I’d type that sequence of words together.

hubertf has a post up about NetBSD’s work to move to a different multiprocessing scheme, along with a 1:1 threading model.  This is similar to what DragonFly is doing, though a different methodology.

Charles M. Hannum, one of the originators of the NetBSD project, posted what I’ll call a rant about the state of NetBSD; he wants NetBSD to lead system development and he blames the organizational layout for slowing development.

It appears he wants to return to the less complex organization of the early days of NetBSD; I don’t think that’s relevant in this stage of NetBSD’s development.   (Is NetBSD the oldest existing open source operating system project?)