It’s actually been out since the start of January, but the release announcement is available now.
Stéphane Russell, on the users@ mailing list, pointed out an in-depth article about DragonFly’s 3.2 release, on linuxfr.org. It’s in French, which means I’m just going to have to trust his word about the contents.
January’s issue of BSD Magazine has something I didn’t expect: an article on panoramic photography on BSD – among other material.
Venkatesh Srinivas and Tim Bisson have been working for some time on a port of FreeBSD’s virtio and virtio-block drivers. (see man page commit) They’ve now been committed. This should make your virtual disk perform better, if nothing else.
If you recall, Phoronix recently ran a bunch of benchmarks on DragonFly. One spot that didn’t look good was the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver”. I’m no closer to knowing what capability it actually tests other than itself, but Alex Hornung, Matt Dillon, and Venkatesh Srinivas figured out that cache coloring was the missing ingredient. DragonFly now scores the same as Linux.
Tangentially related, this cache coloring is happening in nmalloc, which is now used on 64-bit DragonFly systems. The previous one, dmalloc, had problems in long-running programs.
I’m going for the terse list of links. It’s sort of Neukirchen-ish.
- Top 10 Command Line Utilities 2012. a bit silly given the program age but that’s OK. (via)
- The Vim Beginner’s Site. (also via)
- An Amiga emulator in Javascript. (via)
- In the same vein, World of Commodore videos. (via)
- 2600, from 1985, in free collected form. (via)
- Russ Cox’s writing. I’ve linked to some of it before. It’s all fun reading.
- IRC is dead, long live IRC. Shows the first IRC server.
Your unrelated link(s) of the week: Some very good tutorial videos. Don’t worry, it’s just electrostatic discharge, wire safety, fun with capacitors, and how to make a Windows shortcut (via/via)
BSDCan 2013 is looking for papers, all due by the 19th. I mentioned it before, but a reminder went out and Michael W. Lucas wrote up a lengthy explanation of how and why you should present that paper.
John Marino has been working for some time on a project he calls, ‘DPorts’. You may have noticed his recent commits for it. He wrote up a summary on users@ to explain what he’s doing. It’s translating FreeBSD ports to DragonFly in a way that appears to be (relatively) low-maintenance. It only works on DragonFly 3.3 and up and you can’t use it at the same time as pkgsrc.
Most interesting to me, it gets rid of the quarterly release chase that happens with pkgsrc releases. Since it’s primarily a binary install system, packages are only upgraded when the results are known to work.
Ishan Thilina asked for some project ideas, and Samuel Greear gave a list of links that may be useful for anyone looking for a project of their own. I offered strategy. It didn’t work out, but this information’s still useful.
Are you anywhere near Italy? BSD-Day is happening April 6th, 2013, in Naples, Italy, and it would be nice to have some DragonFly representation. (seen on #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
As seen on OpenBSD Journal, the videos for EuroBSDCon 2012 are online. There’s a lot of sessions there, so set aside some time.
Adam Sakareassen submitted a patch for AVX support for 64-bit DragonFly, and Alex Hornung has committed it. If you’re like me and have only the vaguest idea what AVX is, it’s a set of processor instructions added by Intel to Sandy Bridge and later CPUs.
Will you be near Berlin, Germany, in March? The pkgsrccon 2013 technical conference will be held there. Julian Djamil Fagir posted details about the event. The conference is free; you pay for your food and drink. If you’re interested in presenting, you need to contact them before March 8th.
The Open Graphics Project, which is building a completely open video card, needs a wiki maintainer. It’s a volunteer effort. If you were perhaps thinking you wanted to step up to a more complex project but didn’t want to just be writing code, here is a perfect opportunity.
(Not too different from maintaining a project work blog, after all, and I know that’s rewarding.)