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.

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’.

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.

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…