Matthew Dillon was considering completing AMD64 support for the next release, and it looks like he might be starting on it.
 Update: No, that’s disklabel work. Thanks to ‘anonymous’ for indirectly pointing that out.
kern.ipc.nmbufs and kern.ipc.nmbclusters sysctl variables are now read-only, and can only be set at boot. Previously, changing them on a running system would show changed values in any application that reported them, but it wouldn’t actually take effect. If you don’t already change these values, this won’t affect you.
The pkgsrc packages for FireFox and Thunderbird are going through a minor shuffle, to make naming consistent with the latest versions of each. Watch for this on your next upgrade.
If you wanted to use GCC4 instead of the current default of GCC3, on DragonFly, check this description by Matthew Dillon of the proper environment variables to change.
Matthew Dillon laid out his support policy for DragonFly, which boils down to: current release and the previous one.
If you have a DragonFly system, you should update it now. (Point releases have been rolled for 1.8, 1.6, and even 1.4) Non-DragonFly systems should also be updated, if available.
Hasso Tepper pointed at this interesting page of DragonFly C99 projects that I no doubt linked to long ago and then forgot.
Chris Turner posted a nice summary of work that would be needed for C99 compatibility in libm. Sepherosa Ziehau also posted a short guide on how to create new drivers for wpi(4), as the existing drivers (in any BSD) are not up to snuff.
Note: I noticed again while writing this: developerWorks is neat.
If you are mirroring Joerg Sonnenberger’s pkgsrc binary archive from its old location at packages.stura.uni-rostock.de, it’s time to switch. He has a new site, and until his bandwidth has stabilized, it’s best to mirror from Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s site at chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de.
Hasso Tepper passed along word that he has added a more permanent fix for the IPv6 ‘Type 0 routing header‘ bug. The fix has been brought to DragonFly 1.8, 1.6, and 1.4, too.
Sepherosa Ziehau has commited encryption support for 802.11 cards that aren’t ath(4). The commit message goes into far more detail than I can sum up (or understand).
Peter Avalos has updated DragonFly’s One True Awk to the latest version.
Douwe Kiela passed along word that he authored an article on DragonFly BSD’s clustering goals for the Dutch ‘Linux Magazine‘, in their “BSD Corner”.
Matthew Dillon will be committing his integration of SYSREF and struct vnode this Sunday, 2007/05/06. A side effect of this is dynamic allocation and unallocation of vnodes.
In a rare update, OnLAMP.com has a new article: all about the latest release of OpenBSD.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an update for newer bge(4) devices; grab the patch and test if that’s your network driver.
Noticed on the FreeTDS mailing list: the Coverity open source scan, like DragonFly, is using pkgsrc to build software.
Update: “”Building Development Code from pkgsrc” was the presentation at the recent pkgsrcCon that described this, though the abstract does not mention it. Slides may be available soon. (Thanks, Joerg)
If you wanted to rebuild all your already-installed pkgsrc software, this post on pkgsrc-users@ describes the way to do it using pkg_rolling-replace. This can be useful if you want to try a new threading library, for instance.
‘Haidut’ benchmarked several different systems using a vanilla install, and posted the results at his website. (Scroll down) Interestingly, the DragonFly results are quite competitive, especially considering that it’s in a massive transition.