Matthew Dillon commited significant changes to pf in DragonFly; his commit message describes the differences and advantages.
(Yes, I’m running behind on news. Yes, there’s a lot. We’re drinking from the firehose these days.)
BSDTalk 146 had Will Backman asking for links to other BSD-oriented sites. I linked to the interview before, but the comments now have a nice list of BSD sites. I list them all after the jump:
Continue reading “More BSD places to visit”
Matthias Schmidt has set up (in CVS) a page for new items for the 2.0 release of DragonFly. If you’re committing something big to DragonFly, write it down there. Consistent use will give us a pre-prepared list for the actual release, which will probably be late summer.
Matthew Dillon’s recent parallelization of cpdup brought up some interesting features: it can do third-party transfers, copying data from one remote machine to another, and while not faster than rsync, it’s relatively easy to use. Vincent Stemen followed up with a mention of his ‘rbu’ (Remote Back Up) product, that serves as a wrapper around rsync and simplifies the backup process.
Sepherosa Ziehau has posted some work he’s done to reduce serializer contention in an effort to improve network forwarding throughput. His detailed technical explanation also includes some benchmarks; he found a way to improve speeds but finds that there’s still a penalty from multiprocessing support.
The USENIX Annual technical Conference is happening June 22-27 in Boston, Massachusetts, and registration for it has opened. Theres a whole lot of events happening, including a separate poster session, so read the link for details. (via)
The most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2008Q1, is out. I’m working on building it on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org right now. I’ve been running into a wierd problem with lang/python21, though.
I’m not technically qualified to answer the question Josh Triplett asked in comments on my ‘dolt’ article:
If you want to fix that, feel free to send me a patch, or just tell me that DragonFly uses the same -fPIC -DPIC that Linux and FreeBSD use.
Tell him at/send patch to josh@freedesktop.org, and if you do, thank you for helping.
The recent release of the RadeonHD 1.2 driver lists DragonFly support as a new feature, among other changes. Can someone test and confirm? (found via Google Alerts)
cpdup will now perform multiple copies at a time over a network link, from changes by Matthew Dillon. How much more efficient is cpdup with these changes? If someone wants a project, a cpdup benchmark wouldn’t be a bad thing…
Hasso Tepper has made a ginormous update to Citrus, an API for character conversion, syncing it with NetBSD.
BSDCan 2008 is in mid-May, and the schedule is posted. Make your travel plans soon if you plan to go!
This article, titled “Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves“, dates back to 2003, but is surprisingly accurate. I suspect these myths will become even more prevalent; the number of open source projects out there has been increasing year after year, or at least that’s my impression. (Is there any person or organization that’s trying to track the number?) My favorite myth in the article: “End Users Love Tracking CVS”.
Not necessarily about me, but I read an article about the continuous stress of blogging, in the New York Times. Entertainingly, the article says:
Blogging has been lucrative for some, but those on the lower rungs of the business can earn as little as $10 a post, and in some cases are paid on a sliding bonus scale that rewards success with a demand for even more work.
$10 a post? Given that I’ve been doing this for near-free (the Google Ads buy me a sandwich every now and then) for years, that seems like a lot. Not much to live on, though.
Libtool is a very flexible but relatively slow tool used for a lot of software; it can impose a signicant time penalty during compilation. This post to debian-devel@debian.org names a new tool, dolt, which works as a drop-in replacement for libtool can significantly reduce build time. It’s not (yet) supported on DragonFly. The name comes from “do ltcompile”. (from Hasso on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Murray Stokely mentioned the new ‘gold‘ linker for GCC in a blog post. It’s going into binutils, and apparently would provide a nice speedup for linking C++ code. This won’t help so much with (most of) a buildworld on DragonFly, but it would definitely help for KDE or other large third-party applications. (via) No, I don’t know why it’s called ‘gold’.
A new one of these crops up every months or so: a reference list of common Unix commands. (Via)
Also, found with random Google search: BSD and Linux Filesystem Attributes.
This article, “Rethinking the interface to CPAN“, over at Perl Buzz, describes something there needs to be more of in the open source community. CPAN, for those who don’t know, is a way to automatically add various libraries to a Perl installation, similar to BSD ports/pkgsrc or Ruby’s gems.
This is the message from the article: provide a solution to a real problem. I bring this up because a reoccurring frustration people have with pkgsrc is how to upgrade packages. Now, there’s no lack of ways to upgrade, but none of these solutions are a match for what people want: an upgrade method that works without frequent side effects or extra work. This is why portupgrade is very popular for FreeBSD, or apt-get for Debian; it generally works as expected. We need more of the thought process that leads to those solutions, in open source.
I’m not bring this up just to pick on pkgsrc; we need this sort of thinking for the DragonFly BSD website, too. It (and the other BSD websites) take the role of a library shelf, with information only available by sifting through it until you find what you want.
Compare that to the Firefox website: most people are going to visit there to download Firefox. A smaller contingent will already have it and want to upgrade it. There’s a very clear visual path for 90% of the visitors to the site. Now, go to any of the BSD operating system sites, and say “How do I install a working desktop system, with X and a window manager and so on?” It’s going to take some digging.
A different way of looking at the open source projects involved in Google’s Summer of Code project this year: grouped by category. It’s interesting to see groupings like ‘Games’ or ‘Bioinformatics’.
BSDTalk 146 is out, with James Cornell interviewed in a 20-minute podcast. The host, Will Backman, asks “What are your favorite BSD-related websites?”, and “Where can you buy BSD on disk?” Leave a comment on his site if you’ve got an answer.