Month: September 2007

Joerg Sonnenberger pointed me at a recent post on the NetBSD tech-kern@ mailing list: Andrew Doran did some comparisons of MySQL’s sysbench on a multi-CPU system, with different operating systems. It unfortunately doesn’t include DragonFly, as DragonFly apparently would not boot on that system, but I’m a sucker for graphs.

It also shows generally better performance for NetBSD recently than for a Linux 2.6 kernel. This is interesting in part because MySQL performance on BSD has historically been worse than on Linux.

OnLAMP has another of its rare BSD articles up; this time on installing Subversion on BSD, with all the ‘bells and whistles”.

Spotted by Hasso Tepper: The Software Freedom Law Center has a new article up titled “Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project: Guidelines for Developers“, which is another way of saying “How to treat BSD-style licenses right”.

Hasso Tepper wants to get rid of the pcidevs and usbdevs files, as the effort of maintaining them appears to outweigh the benefits.  So far, most people agree.

KernelTrap now has web archives of the mailing lists for DragonFly, along with a number of other projects. The interface looks nice, and allows you to track by author, too.

Hasso Tepper has taken the OpenBSD sensors framework, as ported to FreeBSD by a Summer of Code project, and converted it for DragonFly along with a number of drivers.

Peter Avalos has updated libarchive and also calendar.  Thanks, Peter.

Seen via Gizmodo and other places: 1 gigabyte of storage, then and now.

Hubert Feyrer has done a very nice job of collating all the online material from the various presentations, with data from Axel Gruner, that happened at EuroBSDCon 2007.

OpenBSD Journal has an interesting article up that talks about the life cycle of a bug, as seen by an OpenBSD user.  I call it interesting because it gives a good summary of a bug-squishing process from a ‘user’ perspective.

Strange as it is to use the words “C compiler” and “excitement” in the same sentence, there’s been a lot of excitement about PCC, the Portable C Compiler, as a faster replacement for GCC. (Previous story here)

There’s a web page for it, and a mailing list, though no mail archive I can find associated with it archived at MARC. (Thanks, Anonymous). The web page has a link to an old PostScript document detailing the original PCC design – there’s something about old Unix manuals from Bell Labs that makes them fun to read.

And of course, there’s always the inevitable Wikipedia page.

In BSDTalk 129, Will Backman talks to Dru Lavigne about BSD Certification and her new job at The Open Source Business Resource.

Matthew Dillon, as part of a larger discussion, chimed in with some sensible descriptions of licensing and how it applies to the recent OpenBSD/Linux kerfuffle.

Noah Yan posted how to apply his recent patch for building an AMD64 kernel.  Be warned; it does not create a full usable system – yet.

pcc has been added to NetBSD (via pkgsrc) and OpenBSD, and Steve Mynott has been messing with it on DragonFly. It doesn’t work as a replacement for GCC, but it looks promising. There are other alternatives in progress, too.