Search Results for "devfs"
This Internetnews.com article makes a good point: DragonFly has thrived since splitting from FreeBSD 5+ years ago, and the difference between the systems is more apparent now, with the introduction of DevFS and Hammer.
Alex Hornung has posted a summary of what Unix98 pty devices are, and how they are supported under DevFS. If something screwy happens, there’s even a debug option to turn on.
It’s now possible to set up rules for your dynamic device file system. If this intrigues you, and it should, there’s more details about the rules within the devfsctl(8) man page.
Vinum’s been changed to work with devfs, with the advantage that drive labels instead of device paths can now be used. There’s some caveats – read the message for details.
I totally missed this, but Sascha Wildner reminded me: Alex Hornung now has commit access to DragonFly, due to all the devfs work he’s done.
Matthew Dillon provided a summary of the state of the dynamic device filesystem work, plus a note about the preliminary iSCSI work. He also brings up the notion that iSCSI would eventally allow booting off a drive no matter where it’s physically connected.
DevFS has been added. There’s some issues, each with a workaround. Please test, as it’s certain that a major change like this will cause new problems around video and sound. Once those are fixed, however, device management will be a lot easier.
The DevFS Summer of Code project is going into DragonFly this weekend; be ready for surprises if you update. It’s not complete yet; there’s a few more weeks for Summer of Code, but there’s other work that this code will enable.
Alex Hornung is looking for suggestions on the userland tool(s) for his devfs project. This is a Google Summer of Code project, and I’m a bit late posting this, so hurry if you want to get your two cents in.
Alex Hornung posted a summary of how his work on devfs is going, and Jordan Gordeev posted a summary of how much AMD64 is functional.
If you want to try either one (warning: many parts still broken!), use a vkernel for the devfs so a physical system doesn’t get broken. There’s build instructions for pulling together AMD64 DragonFly.
Update: manual instructions for AMD64, too.
While asking some questions, Alex Hornung let drop some of the details of his Summer of Code devfs project. Sounds like he’s making good progress.
Alex Hornung posted a nice summary of his DevFS project for DragonFly Google’s Summer of Code – Matthew Dillon has a followup, too.
Are you a Summer of Code student for DragonFly? Don’t forget to post a summary of your project to kernel@ before the start. Yes, I know there’s exams.
There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.
Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott
Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon
Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear
Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon
Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper
If you wanted to tackle something difficult, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has suggestions around multiprocessor development and also what is essentially a devfs. (Follow the threads for more information.)
Anyone want to write a new devfs? (That’s device file system, if you haven’t seen the term before.) A discussion about tracking disks and their appropriate mount points ended with Matthew Dillon noting that at this point, the DragonFly system is cleaned up enough that this would be an approachable task for someone with experience.
In a recent post to kernel about adding devices, Matthew Dillon describes how and why device adding on DragonFly deviated from FreeBSD-4, and how it could (eventually) lead to a different sort of devfs.
‘esmith’ asked about udev/hotplug in contrast to FreeBSD-5’s devfs, listing these links for more info.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev-FAQ
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1893
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml
Matt Dillon pointed out that GEOM in FreeBSD may be something DragonFly can present a compatible API for, but it requires the messaging work for VFS and DEV first. Incidentally, Matt will be working on namecache, VOP_LOOKUP, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s prebinding, and Jeffrey Hsu’s changes to ifq.
If, like me, you are clueless on what prebinding and ifq are, here an explanation of prebinding for OS X (should apply here) and ifq… appears to be the queue in which chunks of network information are held/passed? I haven’t found a good explanation. (Comments welcome, if you know)
asmodai pointed out xenofarm during a discussion of the tinderbox builds of DragonFly.
Diego Calleja brought up this paper in reference to discussion of a devfs-style /dev system.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert linked to a patch he made to allow prebinding.
(added later)
Matt Dillon pointed out http://apollo.backplane.com/BSDCON2003/ now has pictures from the FreeBSD DevSummit.