December 2009 – DragonFly BSD Digest

It's New Year's Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I've built up over the past few days.

Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE. This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too...
pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel. Will it work for other BSDs? I hope so, eventually.
The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 - give if you get a chance. Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets? I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video. (via) Kernighan's book, "The Practice of Programming", with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.

Newer disks are moving to 4KB sectors (more info), instead of the 512-byte sectors that have been in use for... decades? There's been some recent discussion on how to support this, for booting DragonFly. It should otherwise work.

The headline sums it up: the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, which was due on the 31st of this month, will be released at the end of the first week of January 2010. The alert message cites a number of different issues.

Matthias Schmidt is posting to Twitter about his time at 26c3 with other DragonFly developers, on his own feed and in @dragonflybsd. (if you are reading this via a Twitter link, you may already know that.) Follow the #26c3 tag if you want to see all the news about the event. A quick scan shows some interesting mobile phone security problems have been discovered. There's streaming video too.

Matthew Dillon is working on moving more of DragonFly out from under the Giant Lock. This may mean some instability this week if you're following the bleeding-edge. He's already posted a warning and an explanation (with numbers!) of work already completed.

BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called "FLOSS 101 Weekly", now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense. (via) It's a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly - specifically, the installer.

I (that's Justin Sherrill, for those reading this other places than the Digest) finished a build of pkgsrc-current on DragonFly 2.4.1 - these packages are available, though soon to be outdated by the pkgsrc-2009Q4 release, due 2010/01/01. This build was mostly to check compatibility before the release.

Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist. And he used DragonFly! Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play. Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld? Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly - I am a big fan of that idea. top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.

BSDTalk (4 years old!) has 24 minutes of talk with Randal Schwartz, talking about a whole pile of different subjects. I met Randal before - he's a decent guy.

A recruiter found me through my administrative role for DragonFly in Google's Summer of Code, and passed along a job description. I'll paste it after the cut. If you're looking for a job (or know someone who might match this job), contact me and I'll pass contact information around. Edit: The recruiter has a similar but non-BSD job also available...) Man, I hope this works out. In the job climate we've had the past year or so, helping someone get a job is very fulfilling. Plus, the job sounds cool... (more…)

Matthew Dillon has refactored the lwkt_token code, for an unspecified speed improvement. He's been doing a lot of MP-lock cleanup recently...

I didn't set anything up with the Digest and tumblr... Please speak up, if you did it. (found via Google)

Avalon.dragonflybsd.org was power cycled, so pkg_radd works now, as does git.dragonflybsd.org.

I love love graphs, and Alex Hornung has created a graph showing the lock contention on a DragonFly system during a buildkernel. (ganked from EFNet #dragonflybsd on IRC)

avalon.dragonflybsd.org is temporarily down, so pkg_radd will not work unless you set $BINPKG_BASE to a new mirror.

If you have previously tried 64-bit DragonFly on a system with more than 3G of RAM and it failed to boot, the problem is fixed.

Following a link from vitunes (which has been updated), I see vimprobable, a vi-ish web browser. Interesting both for its relentless focus on keyboard controls, and for its old-style quietly angry help (from the FAQ):

How will I know if a website is genuine without a phishing filter? Use your brain.

Also along the same lines, vimperator.

Thanks to the urging and help of Matthias Schmidt and Saifi Khan, posts on the DragonFly Digest now also show on Twitter, as @dragonflybsd. (well, except for this one, as it would be redundant.)

Sascha Wildner has added -Werror to the kernel build process. Warnings will now result in an error that stops the kernel from building. If you're a developer, this will force you to create warning-free code when doing kernel development. If you're a user, this will result in a cleaner, more stable kernel.

BSDTalk 182 offers a very timely 12 minutes of talk with Josh Paetzel of iXsystems, talking about the recently not-BSD then BSD-again FreeNAS. (see previous item) Speaking of iXsystems: they have a new facility.