Here’s some recent x86_64 bulk builds: one on DragonFly 2.11, one on NetBSd 5.0.2, and one on Linux 2.6.37.4. Some data of note: DragonFly is within 8%-ish total packages built compared to NetBSD, which could be considered the baseline. Linux, the more common platform for most of the software built, is another step less. I don’t know if there’s any dramatic conclusion to get from this other than, “Hey, a lot of packages build on DragonFly!”
Category: NetBSD
10/16/2011
Lazy Reading for 2011/10/16
I build this up over the course of the week, so I’m never sure what to put here. Does it matter? The meat is the links.
- The Binding of Issac. It’s a roguelike, with shooter elements. It’s also creepy. Here’s the Flash demo. (Windows and Mac only, aww.)
- Why transparency is a good idea. (via… Michael Lucas? I lost track, sorry)
- The JFDI Theory of Language Adoption. This applies to operating systems too; create the shortest possible path between people and what they want to do on that OS.
- NetBSD has added SQLite to the base system. (via) Interesting… having a database(ish) always available leads to some new ways to keep data, outside of the usually “stuff in a text file” format.
Your totally off-topic link for the week: Fat Birds.
08/23/2011
Mixing pkgsrc and alien packages
Anton Panev is working on a Google Summer of Code project for NetBSD, adding support in pkgsrc for RPM/Debian package formats. He posted a status report recently; will this come to DragonFly via pkgsrc? I don’t know!
07/21/2011
clang and pkgsrc bulk builds
I spied a bulk build of pkgsrc using clang. It’s interesting to see the results… It’s on NetBSD, but it should be possible to try the same thing with CCVER on DragonFly. Any takers?
02/23/2011
pcc near 1.0; try on DragonFly?
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
01/04/2011
NYCBSDCon surplus
Apparently the surplus money from the recent NYCBSDCon is going to each of the BSD projects. Great news! Now, what to do with it…
08/29/2010
More BSD Show!
The BSD Show!, the show I didn’t know was there, already has more 20 minutes more of content; an interview with Adam Hamsik about NetBSD.
They’re looking for more guests, too…
06/07/2010
More pcc notes
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
05/18/2010
More Gource and BSD
Paul Onyschuk went and created a very neat and very long Gource movie using one of the oldest codebases out there: NetBSD. It’s available on Vimeo. His original data is available if anyone wants to try something similar.
04/05/2010
Someone please make this video
Gource is a tool for visualizations from version control history; the video page has some examples. (via) I’d love to see this run on DragonFly. I’m curious to see what would happen on a huge, old repo, like NetBSD. Please hlep me, intarwebs!
02/06/2010
Hackathon also for pkgsrc, Feb 19-22
Seen via email and Hubert Feyrer’s blog: There’s a NetBSD hackathon planned for February 19th through the 22nd. The meetup is via IRC. Since it’s NetBSD, it’ll include pkgsrc, and if it includes pkgsrc, it affects DragonFly. If you’re interested, show up – even being there to report on packages that compile or don’t (on DragonFly) would help.
01/21/2010
A project: security checks for pkgsrc
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?
01/11/2010
Huge cleanup for games
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.
12/30/2009
Messylaneous for 2009/12/30
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.
12/23/2009
Messylaneous for 2009/12/23
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.
11/08/2009
Messylaneous for 2009/11/07
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)
10/21/2009
estd update, new hardware support
Johannes Hofmann has taken over estd, a “frequency scaling daemon for NetBSD and DragonFly”. The newest release brings multicore support on DragonFly.
10/12/2009
Stathis keeps going
Stathis Kamperis has ported POSIX message queues to DragonFly (from NetBSD) and has his eyes set on veriexec next.
09/20/2009
POSIX message queue soon
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.
05/03/2009
BSD Book: virtual labs
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.
04/27/2009
Much like this but for NetBSD
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.
04/16/2009
Hammer for Linux, and others
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.
03/22/2009
BSD Summer of Code projects
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.
03/06/2009
BSDTalk 171: Andrew Doran
BSDTalk has Andrew Doran of NetBSD talking about the not-yet-out NetBSD 5 release, for 22 minutes.
02/22/2009
Desktop DragonFly?
“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)
02/14/2009
telnetd vulnerability fixed
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)
02/03/2009
BSDPhone possible
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.
02/10/2007
Other SMP work
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.
08/31/2006
A rant for NetBSD
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?)
04/05/2006
Interview with Jan Schaumann
Daemonnews has an interview with Jan Schaumann up;
the interview is about NetBSD as a desktop system. Many of the answers also apply to DragonFly, as NetBSD and DragonFly both use pkgsrc.
12/22/2005
OnLAMP: Encrypted Disk
OnLAMP has an interview with Roland Dowdeswell, author of CGD (“Crypto-Graphic Disk”) for NetBSD. CGD is an interesting disk driver that encrypts (and decrypts) disk data.