MirBSD is apparently also interested in pkgsrc as an alternative to the exclusive-to-MirBSD Mirports. The more the merrier, I say.
Tim Bisson put together support for the RealTek 8168E network card, under the re(4) driver. It's in DragonFly now.
Another bus bites the dust: EISA is no more on DragonFly. I don't know if there's even any system that DragonFly could boot on and would use this. Still, remove your hats and enjoy a moment of silence.
The planned freeze is underway; so pkgsrc-2010Q4 should arrive soon. How soon? January 1st, if it's by the traditional schedule.
Apparently there's a lot of DragonFly people going to the 27th Chaos Communication Congress. Of course, I don't know if there's any tickets left at this point.
Matthew Dillon fixed a rare and difficult-to-find bug on x86-64 Dragonfly. This means much more of the system can be run 'MPSAFE', or without the Giant Lock. Watch for this soon if you're running 2.9.
The latest(?) version of BSD Magazine is out. Among other things, it has an intro to pkgsrc. The site lists November 2010 for this issue, but it just showed up on the Twitter feed, so I'm not totally sure I have this right. In any case, it's a free download.
Ed Smith was thinking of working on sysctl documentation, but as it turns out, a lot of it has already been done via Google Code-In; Samuel Greear recently committed a lot of it. (Though there's more sysctl work possible.)
While on that topic, Samuel Greear also posted a lengthy summary of all the Code-In work done so far. We need more code-related tasks! The existing ones have been so popular that they're all getting done, quickly.
Venkatesh Srinivas has created what he calls "Super Light Weight Reference Counting", which he describes in a recent post, plus followup. He's already converted sfbuf to use it.
Sepherosa Ziehau recently made a change in TCP handling that could cause a panic. If you get it to happen, he wants to know about it. This only applies to people running bleeding edge DragonFly as of a few days ago.
Sascha Wildner has continued his driver-adding run, bringing in mps(4). This supports various LSI Logic SAS controllers, taken from FreeBSD. Support isn't complete or tested, but it's enough to start with.
Tim Bisson posted a note on the progress he and Pratyush have made on a virtio driver for DragonFly, ported from NetBSD. This is for use in virtualized environments; his post links to graphs (yay!) that show the performance improvement over emulated IDE. His note also links to the code and documentation.
As Matthew Dillon works on supporting his new 48-core system, he's written some notes on power usage and scheduling/drivers that may be worth a read.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.8.4. The commit message has details on what's changed (for us). This is good, since the libarchive site release notes seems to not be up to date.
Update: Peter helpfully pointed at contrib/libarchive/NEWS.
Sepherosa Ziehau fixed a clock issue with the JMicron JMC250/JMC260 chipset, used with the jme(4) driver, and apparently JMicron helped out with hardware for testing this fix. So, thanks, Sephe, and thanks, JMicron! (buy their stuff)
Bleeding-edge DragonFly may suffer some instability issues; Matthew Dillon is making scheduler changes to accomodate larger numbers of CPUs. On the other hand: yay, better performance!
Francois Tigeot figured out how to get it to work.
Jan Lentfer's got the 4.4 version of pf ready for testing. Filtering, queuing, redirection, NAT - all working. It has to be built into your kernel, though that's all of 3 lines of work. Download his branch and try it.
I never really noticed this before, but it's possible to include your own patchsets into pkgsrc and have them picked up as part of the build process, using $LOCALPATCHES.
Peter Avalos has updated zlib to version 1.25, and appears to have done some work with tnftp, though this is the only message I saw.
Ironically, I get a "this site is using an unsupported form of compression" error when browsing to the zlib web site.