The Gnu Public License has reached version 3. Generally, everyone seems indifferent or, in Jem Matzan’s case, apathetic. (Links via hubertf) Everyone’s more interested in the Jesusphone. While we’re being mean about GPLv3… that’s one ugly logo.
Books and books
Here’s two slightly tangential things that involve DragonFly: The first is a thread about large (64-bit) file support in Apache, and how it is treated as a special case because of poor planning under Linux – it’s not a problem in BSD. This led to an excellent quote from an excellent book, “The Cuckoo’s Egg“, by Clifford Stoll:
“We’re watching someone who’s never used Berkeley Unix.” He sucked in his breath and whispered, “A heathen.”
Also, “_why” posted a question about checkpointing to the users@ list, for an issue that Matthew Dillon later fixed. I recall that this _why is the same fellow who wrote “Why’s (Poignant) Guide to Ruby“, a programming book that is unlike any other.
More on potential processor problems
Theo De Raadt’s description of bugs in recent Intel processors has made it to Slashdot, where in the comments, Matthew Dillon went through each bug and listed his opinion on each. (two comment entries, starting here) In contrast, Linus Torvalds’ general response was much more subdued. (Thanks, Wiger Van Houten, for links)
Potential processor problems
According to these reports from the OpenBSD-misc mailing list, Intel’s Core Duo is buggy, and upcoming features on Intel motherboards create a second running environment accessible even when your computer is off, both of which create security risks. (Thanks, Hasso Tepper)
Before anyone starts to hyperventilate, keep in mind: 1: this is a warning of potential problems, not an assessment of existing problems. 2: It’s an OpenBSD mailing list, which can be described as ‘adversarial’.
WPA + DHCP support
Sascha Wildner posted a patch that allows direct use of WPA and DHCP commands within ifconfig for wireless connections, along with some other changes.
Watching everything on a filesystem
It is indeed possible to watch every file access made on your system, everywhere, by attaching ktrace to the init process. It’ll generate a lot of data, though.
Proprietary ATI drivers and BSD
Here’s an entertaining possibility: Brian de Alwis, on the port-i386 NetBSD mailing list, noted that he was able to get ATI’s proprietary drivers for XFree86/Xorg working on NetBSD, at least for Xinerama support.  I daresay this would work for DragonFly too – anyone have a recent ATI card to try out? (Original link from Greg Troxel)
Reread about pbulk
Because my timing is awesome, I wrote an entry about Joerg Sonnenberger’s new pbulk system just as the computer hosting it went down. It’s back up, so, go back to the original entry if you missed the original output from that bulk build.
Comments about SMP
A recent post here on the Digest attacted a lot of comments – some trolling, some useful. Read at your leisure.
BSDTalk 118 – Sidsel Jensen
BSDTalk, which has a working RSS feed again, has a 9 minute interview with Sidsel Jensen from EuroBSDCon.
UnixReview: the usual suspects
This week, UnixReview.com has a full arrangement of the usual topics: “Certification Changes and Updates“, a Regular Expressions column on “Python’s Mechanization“, a Shell Corner column continuing “Littera Delenda Est“, along with “Elements of Efficient and Secure Service Provisioning with Solaris“, and “Test Your Knowledge of Users and Groups“. Strangely, no book reviews this time.
BSDTalk 117: One-time passwords
The latest BSDTalk has no interview; it instead goes into using one-time passwords for a 6-minute talk.
Games games games
Seen linked on Blue’s News: Kahvipapu articles on Linux gaming with first person shooters, and strategy games parts one and two. There’s more sections promised, and it covers some games I’ve never heard of.
I link it here because some subsection of these games run on DragonFly; they can be found in pkgsrc or may compile directly. DragonFly’s biggest hurdle for many games is the lack of 3D support through DRI. Now that we have modular xorg, it’s probably not too complex a project. Admittedly, I’d mostly be using it for fancy screensavers, but it’s still a project I’d like to see.
If someone wanted to fill a niche site need, there’s no site that exists for BSD games. Admittedly, it’s a subset of a relatively small audience, with a limited quantity of games, but that just means that such a site could be built with sheer willpower, rather than funding.  Kind of like this one!
pbulk initial results
Joerg Sonnenberger has posted the results of his new pbulk system, for bulk builds of pkgsrc, on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list.  His test bed is building DragonFly, so the results show just how many packages build on DragonFly. The report comes in text and graphical (warning: big!) versions too.
An interesting corollary to this, from reading the reports, is that out of 7,213 packages in pkgsrc, only 167 actually fail to build on DragonFly – that’s only 2% broken. There are other packages that fail due to dependencies on those broken packages, but it’s still a remarkably good percentage.
Biggity big big
How big a disk can DragonFly’s new 64-bit disklabel support? Very.
Heads up twice on disklabel
Two warnings: the compatibility slice is changing, and disklabel is going through extensive changes. If you run bleeding-edge code, you will want to do a full rebuild.
InformIT DragonFly article
Steve_- on #dragonflybsd and others sent along a link to an article on DragonFly on InformIT.com. It’s pretty in-depth, though there are some minor errors.
pkgsrcCon 2007 video!
Videos of the talks from the most recent pkgsrcCon are up now. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer)
Sound and its details
Chris Turner wrote up an interesting summary of what he’s seen in terms of the need for ‘realtime’ audio and how it’s been dealt with in the Linux world as well as BSD. There’s some mailing list links in there that can be used to eat up an hour or two of reading on a weekend…
New committer: Joe Talbott
Welcome Joe Talbott, who by this change appears to be our newest committer.