Chris Turner is looking to implement something similar to OpenBSD's mount_vnd(8) operation, where virtual disks can be mounted at boot. He talks about some of the work and ideas at length. If you don't feel like reading about it, you can instead mess with it; he has a tarball of the current state of his work linked in his message.
If you're using pf to control how your bandwidth is used, you may want to look at the recent fairq updates from Matthew Dillon. It should perform better now in situations where one traffic group is saturating its available bandwidth. Here's a handy link that explains this sort of problem, yoinked from IRC.
If you're running the bleeding edge version of DragonFly, because Sepherosa Ziehau's recent work makes it possible to boot systems that were previously bootable, you may need this sysctl trick loader tunable in loader.conf:
debug.acpi.enabled="pci pci_link"
How will you know that you need it? The system will run strangely slow. The command enables ACPI interrupt routing, which corrects for mptable problems.
This week's Daemon & Penguin podcast is about 3 things that I did not know existed. The mystery computer items are two languages, Genie and Vala. The mystery movie is S.Darko, a sequel to a movie that I am aware of, but never saw: Donnie Darko.
pf in DragonFly 2.9 is currently equivalent to OpenBSD's 4.4 version. This is probably what will be in the next release version of DragonFly, as Jan Lentfer, the man responsible for the rapid, recent pf upgrades, is a new father (again). Congratulations on the new daughter, Jan!
Summer of Code 2011 student applications can be made now. If you're a student, you've got until April 8th to get it done! (Calendar) Remember, you can't be too organized, too early.
I had linked to this before during Summer of Code 2010 before it completed, but an ongoing discussion on the kernel@ mailing list for DragonFly reminded me: a student named Naohiro Aota put together a Gentoo/DragonFly system for SoC 2010, similar to the existing Gentoo/FreeBSD project. He's interested in working directly with DragonFly, now.
John Marino's work on getting support for DragonFly 'natively' into binutils, upstream, has been successful. Thanks, John!
I've found enough good links I'm able to schedule this post ahead of time. Yay!
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author, is selling a short story via Amazon/Kindle. It has nothing to do with BSD, directly.
- Also, he offers beer to anyone who can get KVM working on a BSD. Any BSD. I guess vkernels don't count, really.
- This idea came up at work recently: Etherkiller!
- The evolution of computer displays. (via) It covers some pretty ancient stuff - the article doesn't even get to Pong until page 3.
- A paper on the new PBI format for PC-BSD (PDF). This is being presented at AsiaBSDCon.
- The Dancing Poultry License (via ftigeot on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A chart of the evolution of science fiction. (via) There's some good titles in there, if you can read it.
The mentor signup page for Google Summer of Code 2011 is available again, launched using a new interface. If you want to be a mentor, please sign up now. The student application period opens tomorrow!
The mentor signup page for Google Summer of Code 2011 as of this writing still says "We have temporarily disabled the creation of new requests and invites in preparation of the launch of the new UI for Melange later this week.", as it has said since the 20th.
So, if you're wanting to mentor, keep an eye on it. I'll send mentor requests to any of the names on my list of people that have already expressed interest, if I get to a working version of the page before you do...
As already mentioned on this Digest, the freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2011Q1, has started. I've also completed several bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 and pkgsrc-current using DragonFly system with GCC 4.4. Francois Tigeot has very kindly gone out of his way to get some of the (relatively few) broken packages listed in those builds to be fixed.
This is the BSD-licensed version of libiberty, which was removed because it didn't ever actually make it to being a replacement.
As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow. If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.
There's a DragonFly BSD group on identi.ca, the not-as-creepy-as-Facebook social site.
APIC support has been updated, so not only will some machines work better/at all with a multiprocessor kernel, more machines will boot. Not only that, but Sepherosa Ziehau has a newer version of ACPI and interrupt routing available. This is wonderful news! We've needed this update for some time.
My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available. Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change. I'm starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.
The Daemon & Penguin podcast has a new 50-minute podcast about GhostBSD, a FreeBSD/Gnome install, and a review of the horror movie Parasomnia.