Bootsplash loader and gzip

Emiel Kollof noted that it would be nice if the splash screen loaders could read gzipped files, so that any splash screens could be stored in a compressed format and still used. Hiten Pandya pointed at kern/imgact_gzip.c and boot/i386/kgzldr/boot.c for examples, if anyone wants to tackle this project.

/bin/sh fixed

/bin/sh had a big introduced recently that would make it crash when booting with a new world. It’s been fixed, so recompile /bin/sh with updated sources when possible.

Installing from source

I wrote down the explicit steps I used to get a DragonFly machine running and up-to-date; I’m including them here for the benefit of others. This was working as of mid-September.

** Updated December 2003; silly typos.

** Update February 2004: This guide was written using FreeBSD 4.8 as a guide; it may break. There is a guide page on dragonflybsd.org that talks about upgrading from FreeBSD 4.9.
Continue reading “Installing from source”

Bugs, lost and found

It looks like the PC Card problems mentioned earlier are really a problem with the DHCP client. David Rhodus is looking for someone to try a new import of the ISC DHCP code. (Updated – an import from FreeBSD-5 is happening instead, since that fixes some problems with the most recent ISC code.)

Galen Sampson found that using NFS without -maproot will cause file truncation; Matt Dillon has a temporary hack that will fix it, which will be committed by the end of the week if it works without trouble.

Matt Dillon disabled background bitmap writes, as it can apparently cause certain race conditions. He notes: “Eventually the problem background bitmap writes solved will be solved more generally by implementing page COWing durign [sic] device I/O to avoid stalls on pages undergoing write I/O.”