OpenBSD is being ported to the Zaurus PDA platform (see general user FAQ) (thanks OpenBSD Journal) NetBSD has the 2004 4th quarter report out. Also, NetBSD now supports the TS-7200 via the evbarm port, which is a single-board computer similar to the well-known Soekris products. (Seen on Slashdot/BSD.) Small computer products like that make me wish I could find a small, cheap LCD screen to hook up, and create a laptop-ish computer.
gobsd.com has a new bootstrap kit for pkgsrc.
Low on time, so it’s all mushed together:
Joerg Sonneberger has an explanation of RSA vs. DSA encryption. Unixreview.com has two useful articles – how to test a new version of MySQL without disturbing your current install and a book review of “Advanced Unix Programming”. And, oh yeah – ntpdate is gone – use rdate.
Chuck Tuffli has ported the fxp (Intel Etherexpress network card) driver that uses bus_dma, and so should be very speedy. Andrew Atrens ported the iwi driver, for the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG MiniPCI. Both are looking for testers.
Robert Watson posted some plans about SMP on FreeBSD. It’s interesting to contrast it with what’s planned for DragonFly, and how well the changes affect single and multiprocessor performance. (thanks BSDNews).
Joerg Sonneberger has removed Perl. The /usr/bin/perl binary will still be sitting there, though.
The system hosting this page, shiningsilence.com, won’t be going down this weekend after all. The new system’s motherboard has a broken IDE controller, so an RMA is going to have to happen first. Darnit!
Matthew Dillon’s committed some more changes for journaling, and posted a progress summary.
George Georgalis posted a link to a “Considered Harmful” article – this time, it’s recursive make.
shiningsilence.com, where the DragonFly BSD Log is hosted, is having a hardware upgrade this weekend, which means some downtime. Please be patient.
MAtthew Dillon created a spot in the docs to note which laptops work with DragonFly – due to the custom hardware in most laptops, it can be hit or miss for many laptops and non-Windows operating systems. While talking about his IBM r32 (which works), Paul Grunwald suggested the site off-leasecomputers.com as a laptop source.
On kernel@, Antonio Vargas brought up the splice() I/O model planned for the Linux kernel.
Slashdot/BSD has a story on Sun revoking the Java license for FreeBSD, which is not a surprise to anyone who saw mention of this in December’s FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. (Admittedly, it was overshadowed by the non-corporation donation needs.) The real answer is that the license expired because of a SNAFU rather than a desire by Sun to end Java use on FreeBSD, and it’s getting worked out. This affects DragonFly to some extent, since Java can be built from the port system DragonFly inherited from FreeBSD.
A fellow named Gregory McGarry has written a paper showing NetBSD outperforming FreeBSD 5 on a number of benchmarks. These would be more accurately called microbenchmarks, as the paper describes very specific system activities, repeated. It would be interesting to repeat with DragonFly – and it could be done, as the paper includes details on how to repeat. The benchmark is similar to an earlier BSD and Linux comparison done more than a year ago. (seen on BSDNews)
‘walt’ posted a question about how makefile variables interoperate, for which Max Okumoto wrote a detailed explanation.
Jeffrey Hsu has replaced and improved the routing code, some of which dates back 30 years.
Guillermo Garcia Rojas has completed a Spanish translation of the DragonFly FAQ.
Zera William Holladay is due credit for filling Emiel Kollof’s donation request for hard drives on the DragonFly Donations page. Consider donating, if you have something that matches.