“Building OpenSolaris Communities“, found on an OpenSolaris blog, is a generally excellent guide on how to build an open-source community. It’s based around OpenSolaris, which isn’t a surprise, but almost everything discussed applies equally well to DragonFly or other projects without a corporate source. (via… I lost track, sorry!)
Hasso Tepper recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc on DragonFly 1.13. He’s posted the end result, and it’s looking much better than it did at the last quarterly release: 87% complete, and only 5% of the remaining amount were actual build failures – the rest were dependencies on those failed items.
Aggelos Economopoulos, who is working on making the network stack multiprocessor safe, has a page up on the DragonFly wiki describing his work. Normally I’d link to his recent conversations about this on the kernel@ mailing list, but he’s already done a nice job describing/linking it on the wiki.
Benchmarks would be good. I bring this up because Hubert Feyrer has a post about various NetBSD happenings, which includes some interesting benchmark work. It doesn’t include DragonFly, but it’s a good model from which to work. Notice the hint there? Was it too subtle?
Most of the benchmarking work these days seems to focus on multi-cpu scalability… I would like to just see comparative numbers, especially since there’s still plenty of single-cpu systems around.
Hasso Tepper, who has been submitting many pkgsrc changes lately, noticed a few non-trivial pkgsrc issues. He listed them out as available projects for anyone who wants to help out.
Another linkdump!
- Waxy.org has a complete version of the 5-part series, The Machine That Changed the World. This aired in 1992 and is both an excellent history of computing and also an interesting glimpse of the computing world before the World Wide Web steamrolled into the public eye. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 are available. If you don’t have a Flash-enabled browser to watch them, part 5 has a link to a torrent of H.264 MP4 files that contain the same complete broadcase.
- More old school nerditry: Dungeons & Dragons history, plus a rebuttal, all in far more depth than I thought possible. (Via)
- New school (rejectionist) nerditry: Ten ways to make an iPhone killer.
Undeadly.org has an interesting article about sticking to base applications. It’s all about making the programs that come in the base system install work instead of needing to install third-party packages to get a comfortable work environment.
It’s OpenBSD specific, but it is generally applicable to any system with a base set of included tools, which generally means all BSDs. The comments have some interesting parts, too, like using a source control system to synchronize dotfiles across multiple systems. (just having one consistent .vimrc would make me happy)
KernelTrap has a very nice summation of Constantine Murenin’s BSDCan 2008 talk about the OpenBSD sensors framework. This framework is in DragonFly now. It was also in and then out of FreeBSD; the KernelTrap article (in addition to describing how the actual code works) covers some of the conversation between Poul Henning-Kamp and Constantine Murenin at the BSDCan event about why that happened with FreeBSD.
Updated again: description changed, at Constantine’s request.
“FreeBSD – The Unknown Giant” has a nice compilation of BSD videos (and some pictures) from recent conferences.
A recent commit from Matthew Dillon improves HAMMER’s write performance, but introduces some potential stability problems. They should be solved in the next few days.
In my ongoing effort to stray farther off the beaten path than other nerdblogs, I bring you a link to this post at the Nonist: Objectified Circuitry. Think of it this way: the computer you are sitting at right now has probably at least a million of each circuit type pictured in that article.
These parodies of the “Vista Capable” stickers contain, among other systems, DragonFly BSD.
For some end-of-the-work-week reading: Aggelos Economopoulos posted some of his thoughts on in_pcbs for his planned work on removing the Big Giant Lock from networking.
GameSetPlay has another @Play column, with comparisons of roguelike games to Dungeons and Dragons. If you find this interesting, you may be an old-school geek. Like me.
This week’s BSDTalk has an nearly half-hour interview, from BSDCan 2008, with 7 different members of the FreeBSD Core Team.
I think I already read about this, but it didn’t really sink in until I read this commit message: HAMMER will allow multiple physical devices to be mounted as a single volume. Wait! That’s in the wrong tense: it’s possible now.
The new ‘undo’ utility looks equally interesting, though the name may not stay.
Max Lindner posted a summary of his SoC plans for enhancing dma this summer, and he’s looking for feedback.
Louisa Luciani is looking for more discussion on her LiveDVD project; specifically, what kind of environment to create. She’s already collated previous suggestions on the wiki.
Robert Luciani (yes, they’re related) recently finished a school project evaluating threading on DragonFly; his poster and paper (PDF) are available. Appropriately,he’s working on multiprocessing support.
(typos fixed – thanks, smtms on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Among other HAMMER work, Matthew Dillon has added a “softprune” option. With this option, historical versions of a HAMMER filesystem can be tracked by maintaining a list of soft links. There’s some sort of joke about ‘regularity’ to make here.
Matthew Dillon’s new statvfs() calls in the kernel require a full build/install process for world and kernel, if you are running bleeding edge code.