DragonFly BSD Digest » NetBSD

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.

Some pkgsrc bulk build comparisons

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 26 Oct 2011 01:36:34 +0000

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!”

Lazy Reading for 2011/10/16

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 16 Oct 2011 18:32:28 +0000

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.

Mixing pkgsrc and alien packages

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 23 Aug 2011 23:28:30 +0000

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!

clang and pkgsrc bulk builds

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 22 Jul 2011 02:07:05 +0000

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?

pcc near 1.0; try on DragonFly?

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 24 Feb 2011 03:57:39 +0000

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)

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…

More BSD Show!

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 29 Aug 2010 15:01:54 +0000

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…

More pcc notes

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 08 Jun 2010 01:25:55 +0000

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.

More Gource and BSD

Justin Sherrill — Wed, 19 May 2010 02:11:17 +0000

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.

Someone please make this video

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 06 Apr 2010 02:33:48 +0000

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!

Hackathon also for pkgsrc, Feb 19-22

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 07 Feb 2010 03:13:14 +0000

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.

A project: security checks for pkgsrc

Justin Sherrill — Fri, 22 Jan 2010 01:27:17 +0000

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?

Huge cleanup for games

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 02:55:26 +0000

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.

Messylaneous for 2009/12/30

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 31 Dec 2009 03:29:05 +0000

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.

Messylaneous for 2009/12/23

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 24 Dec 2009 01:45:25 +0000

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.

Messylaneous for 2009/11/07

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 08 Nov 2009 18:30:04 +0000

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)

estd update, new hardware support

Justin Sherrill — Thu, 22 Oct 2009 00:10:10 +0000

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

Stathis keeps going

Justin Sherrill — Tue, 13 Oct 2009 00:02:44 +0000

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

POSIX message queue soon

Justin Sherrill — Sun, 20 Sep 2009 21:53:59 +0000

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.