In case you are using either of those programs, there's fixes for building/using them.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been continuing his work on improved interrupt support.  I have no one central commit to point to, but rather a zillion bits of work on this and other stuff.  I feel it's always good to recognize when someone's volunteering a lot of work - Thanks, sephe!
Entertainment, this week.  There's several items here that will be more entertaining if you're over 25.  Or maybe 35.  Get clicking!
'file' has been updated to version 5.05 by Peter Avalos.  file(1) is one of those utilities that I forget is a contributed, external piece of software, even though it's been in Unix since 1973. (file is one year older than me!)
Sourceforge had/has a security problem, so they've turned off some services until it's fixed.  However, anything planning to download from Sourceforge will be affected, so some packages in pkgsrc may not be able to build for ... a day or two?
Tim Bisson posted new network tests contrasting the virtio driver against emulated re(4) in virtual environments.  Previously, the virtio driver performed worse, but a more developed test suite seems to deliver more positive results.
Samuel J. Greear has written a summary of DragonFly's experience with Google Code-In 2011, noting that the students tacked harder projects than expected, and relatively easy documentation projects were less popular than expected.  He has hard numbers on tasks done, too. I think this article holds the "number of hyphens in a title" record for this blog.
The latest BSD Magazine is "BSD's and Solaris", and it sets my teeth on edge to write that apostrophe.  Seen via FreeBSDNews, though I haven't seen it noted in BSD Magazine-sourced email/RSS yet.
Google Summer of Code is happening again!  (FAQ, timeline)  Of course, DragonFly will be applying to participate as a mentoring organization again this year.  The last several years have all been fruitful with completed projects and new developers, so it's worth the effort.
Stuff!
  • I find this erasure of the separation between remote code repository and local code editor very interesting.   It may upset more traditional people.
  • If you haven't been watching the BSD Events Twitter stream, Dru Lavigne's written a nice summary of the next few months, including BSD Exam dates/locations.
  • The XFCE 4.8 release announcement hinted at some problems with BSD.  It's apparently because udev, a Linux-only product, is the only consistent way to access various items, so XFCE's power and volume controls use it.  There's no udev on BSD, so we get left out.  I'd normally end this with a call for a compatibility layer, but udev is the latest in a series of jumps from framework to framework in Linux, so I don't know if it would actually do any good.  (Thanks, sjg on #dragonflybsd for the link)
  • The Economist has an article on open-source that does a hype-free job of describing the state of open source today.  It points out two trends that I don't think are covered enough: the large amount of open-source work funded by companies, and the hidden costs of training and integration.  One downside of the "software is free, training costs money" model for open source is that it creates an economic incentive for byzantine configurations and difficult setups.  That idea could use some exploration, but I don't think many people want to, precisely because it's negative.  The article doesn't go that far, but they should.
Matthew Dillon's updated fsstress for x86_64, so if you have a 64-bit machine that needs a workout - here you go.
James Polera found that M5 Hosting was willing to install a DragonFly server for hosting, in addition to their other BSD/Linux offerings.  Their service was also apparently excellent.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, is back up at a new location, with new disks and new connectivity.  pkg_radd should work by default again, as should git.dragonflybsd.org.