Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.
BSDTalk has another new episode, (197… almost at the 2-century mark!), and it has 37 minutes of conversation with M. Warner Losh about FreeNAS.
Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip. It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list. It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.
‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager. The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.
The BSD Show! (am I supposed to include that ! every time? I’m not sure.) has a 10-minute interview with Caryn Holt of MidnightBSD. Also, the B-side of the interview is up.
In an effort to support a new system with an AMD 880G chipset, Matthew Dillon has updated the AHCI driver. If you have SATA drives using AHCI, please test. (with any chipset, not just 880G.)
I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted. Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process. (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)
Sascha Wildner has brought in some changes to twa(4), for various 3ware RAID controllers, from FreeBSD. Also, YONETANI Tomokazu has added PCI IDs fixed up files for Adaptec ServeRAID 7x ips (4) devices.
Two recent changes in the way virtual kernels are constructed should make a speed difference. The startup time is reduced (and more memory can be given to the vkernel), and the overall running speed should be quicker, too.
DragonFly’s version of pf (corresponding with OpenBSD’s 4.2 version) is now multiprocessor safe, to match the network stack. pf itself isn’t using multiple processors; it’s just able to work without causing problems in an otherwise MPSAFE environment, thanks again to Jan Lentfer. Note that there’s one minor caveat.
Swapoff has been added to DragonFly. This was a potential Summer of Code project, and also happened to have a bounty offered for it. $300 goes to Ilya Dryomov. If money for code like this interests you, check the Code Bounties page for more projects…
Dear universe: improved interrupt routing, or deduplication in HAMMER would make me happy. I’m not picky.
It’s another BSD audio recording! Our cup runneth over, as long as you have a cup that holds audio recordings. BSDTalk 196 has Mark Saad and George Neville-Neil, talking for 10 minutes about NYCBSDCon 2010.
I totally meant to post this yesterday. Oops!
- We’re using toeplitz. I just like the name; I don’t understand how it works.
- The idea of software forks has been around since, oh, BSD and System V Unix diverged, if not earlier. Here’s an article that talks about forking in general, rather breathlessly. After reading that, read this perhaps more accurate fork parody. (via)
- You know what we could use for pkgsrc, and all the other port/package collections? Explanation. They face the same problem phone application stores face: too many programs to easily select what you need. You could certainly build a whole site just around package reviews; it’s even possible to argue that Ubuntu or PC-BSD are built around just making some 3rd-party-app choices ahead of time on an existing operating system. Anyway, here’s an article talking about that idea specifically around the Apple App Store. Please won’t somebody who is not me do something like that for pkgsrc?
- This writeup of one man’s experience with Forth gives a good feel for the language, or at least as good a feel as I can understand. Posted in memoriam for our recently departed Forth bootloader. (via) There’s other enjoyable articles on that blog, too.
- This describes about two years of my life, except it was mostly Zangband.
Another B-Side show, this time with additional recordings from the pfSense show.
After the BSD Show episode with me talking about DragonFly finished, we continued joking around for a good while; Gamaral of the BSD Show! has edited that together into a “B-side“. Enjoy! By this point, I was relaxed, so I sound better.
Due to changes in networking, most of the wireless drivers in 2.7 stopped working a few days ago. Joe Talbott’s “brought back” iwi, ral, and wi. If you’re running 2.7 and using one of those drivers, it should be safe, relatively, to upgrade to a newer 2.7.
This week’s BSD Show! has 25 minutes of talking with Jim Pingle about pfSense.
A little work has snowballed into even more of the network systems in DragonFly being pulled apart in order to get rid of the Giant Lock. It may delay the 2.8 release by a week or two, but it’s already paying dividends, such as NFSv3 now performing at maximum physically possible speeds on gigabit Ethernet.
(I ran out of alliterative words, sorry.) Venkatesh Srinivas has committed his work on memory allocation; his commit message has details. He’s kindly provided a link to the article that inspired the per-thread magazine work. He’s also provided graphs to show comparative performance benefits of his new memory allocator on DragonFly and on FreeBSD.
Jan Lentfer has now updated pf in DragonFly to version 4.2, on top of his earlier work to get to 4.1. This upgrade apparently doubles speed from 4.1, plus he’s brought in some other, later fixes. Thanks for doing a superhuman amount of work, Jan!
Well, technically not ripped out, just serialized roughly. This means if you update your DragonFly 2.7 machine in the next few days, the wireless drivers may not work, except for (I think) ath(4). They should return, better, by next week.