I posted before about changes to the commit template for DragonFly, but Alex Hornung has written up exactly what he did, with better details on how to use it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been committing a bunch of changes for em/emx(4) and bce(4). You may have hardware that has suddenly become supported, for instance. Also, credit is due to David Christensen and Broadcom for sending hardware to test out.
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado really wants a port of DragonFly to Xen. He can’t do it himself, but he did a nice job of writing up the problem, and even found resources to help any developer wanting to take on this task.
BSDTalk 206 is 17 minutes with Peter Losher of the Internet Software Consortium. I don’t think people realize how much ISC does…
Somehow, I ended up with the most concise link listing I’ve ever done, even though I have a pretty good batch here. Go figure.
- Who doesn’t like the taste of BSD? Mmm, delicious.
- “redundant array of inexpensive crap”
- The invention of email. (via, via) It predates Unix.
- The worst ‘hacking’ scenes ever. (via) Starts funny, then you get angry.
- A nice explanation of the Lorenz Attractor, which I had only ever experienced as a screen saver. (via)
- Possibly the smallest roguelike ever.
Two completely separate and unrelated changes:
First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found. MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.
Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped. Speak up if you need them to stick around.
If you’ve had a lack of emails from the DragonFly mailing lists lately, this SORBS listing event might be why.
Do you have a Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG, 2225BG, or 2915ABG wireless card? The driver is iwi(4). It requires a kernel module and some downloadable firmware, which makes it slightly more troublesome to set up. Luckily, ‘ferz’ has written up just how to get it working.
Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’. Thanks, Jeremy!
Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers… but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests. Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against? Here’s the moment to note that.
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
Pkgsrc bmake bootstrap, that is. There’s a new version of bmake, and it needs to be tested on every platform possible.
A light week. School’s nearly out in the States, so I expect the Internets to be quieter.
- Another open-source compiler suite. Maybe parts of it were open before? I don’t know; all I have to go on is a press release. Remember when there was GCC or nothing?
- Read this; it will show you just how amazingly intricate the Telehack project is. If that doesn’t convince you, read this.
- Incomplete man pages are no fun. Not this bad, but close.
- Do you use PuTTY as a SSH client on Windows? This PuTTY shortcut creator may be really handy. It also saves your settings in a sane location, instead of buried somewhere in the registry as PuTTY does.
- The origin of Pong. (via) It debunks some of the legends.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.
Do you have a Via CPU? Do you use padlock(4)? (The driver for cryptographic functions, which Via processors support with hardware acceleration) Alex Hornung made some untested changes to support the hardware random number generator, but he needs people to test it.
Audio recordings of the events at BSDCan 2011 are now available, in mp3 form. If the file names aren’t descriptive enough, you can go through the speaker list and match up. (found indirectly via Facebook)
The pkgsrc ‘freeze’ in preparation for the pkgsrc-2011Q2 branch is coming up, starting this Sunday the 19th. This means the quarterly release will be tagged in about 2 weeks, and I’ll probably have binary packages built for DragonFly about a week or so after that.
BSDDay Argentina is starting to look for speakers. The official site doesn’t list 2011 dates yet, but it’ll be in November, in Buenos Aires. (via Damian Vicino) Alex Hornung gave a DragonFly presentation there last year…
There’s still a few packages in pkgsrc that don’t support DESTDIR (e.g. being built by someone other than root). If you want to help out, here’s a list of those 60 packages.
A nice big pile of links this week. Some of these may have cropped other places by now, but oh well.
- An interview with Dennis Richie about inventing Unix. (via) I like that he sounds just absolutely tickled that there’s a version of ‘his’ operating system on his phone.
- A nice article describing Project Euler, for those who want to program; or program more. (via several places)
- Michael Lucas points out something that isn’t new but still needs reinforcement: avoid SSH1.
- Anecdotal evidence that SSD drives fail a lot. On the other hand, the bulk builds I’ve done of pkgsrc have worked the crap out of several SSDs and I haven’t killed a single one.
- Weird things in IPv6 routing. (indirectly via this, via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd IRC)
- Aw, Google’s BSD-specific search page is gone. Not that it was really needed at this point; I hadn’t seen a difference in the search results for some time. There’s more pressing issues.
- The FreeBSD Foundation has a trip report from Sergio Ligregni and from Thomas Abthorpe, from sponsored trips to BSDCan 2011. I’d encourage everyone to make it to a BSD convention – it’s energizing to see others working on BSD, in person.
- I don’t think you really need a guide for this. (via)
- Emacs user at work.
- Totally unrelated: best dubstep video ever.
The Open Source Business Resource magazine is going with a rare unthemed issue in August. So, this is your chance to get published on your own specific business/open source topic! Articles are due by July 10th.