I finally got DragonFly 3.4.2 img/iso files uploaded, so they are available now or at least soon at your local mirror. These are built using pkgsrc, so if you want dports, go for a snapshot image.
Are you using it and unable to upgrade to KDE4 for a specific reason other than aesthetic preference? You should check this thread about support for 3.5, at least in dports.
There’s more download statistics on dports and pkgsrc packages, from Francois Tigeot. There’s a heck of a lot of dports activity, though there’s probably much more pkgsrc building from source than this would report on. So, not necessarily representative of actual numbers, but an interesting ratio none the less.
Matthew Dillon and Sascha Wildner have converted snapshot/release building over to use dports instead of pkgsrc. If you want to try one of those snapshots, look in the snapshots directory… Oh, and here’s the mention of this on kernel@.
Here’s another “getting started with dports” article. It runs through the basic range of commands, similar to my existing writeup – but much less verbose.
Phoronix has another set of benchmarks that include DragonFly and PC-BSD, along with several Linux distributions. It’s interesting to see, though don’t take them as performance measurements. 7-Zip as a benchmark doesn’t describe much other than the program itself, and the Himeno benchmark results are because of the compiler in use rather than any underlying performance aspect of the operating system – for instance. The DragonFly benchmarks disappear after page 3.
I’ve tagged DragonFly 3.4.2. The major reasons for this point release were fixes for DragonFly under Xen with more than 2 CPUs specified, and for booting x86_64 DragonFly in KVM. The 3.4.2 tagged commit has every detail.
If you’ve already got a working 3.4.1 installation, you don’t need to rush to upgrade; this is mostly for the people affected by the issues listed above. I’m working on 3.4.2 install images; give that some time to complete and upload if you need one.
Here’s the accepted projects for DragonFly and Google Summer of Code 2013:
- Block compression feature in HAMMER2, Daniel Flores Tafur, mentored by Matthew Dillon
- Capsicum kernel implementation, Joris GIOVANNANGELI, mentored by Alex Hornung
- Implement hardware nested page table support for vkernels, Mihai Carabas, mentored by Venkatesh Srinivas
- Make vkernels checkpointable, Pawel Dziepak, mentored by Samuel Greear
- Userland System V Shared Memory / Semaphore / Message Queue implementation, Grigore Larisa-Ileana, mentored by Markus Pfeiffer
Like last year, we had more excellent proposals than we could accommodate with available slots and mentors. We now enter the ‘community bonding’ period, so that students can get used to the DragonFly environment and make sure they have all the tools needed to perform work. The work itself starts on June 17th.
Good luck to everyone involved!
Michael W. Lucas wrote a new edition to his Absolute OpenBSD book, and that second edition was published relatively recently. It’s a hefty book, nearly 500 pages in length, and I’ve needed to write a review for some time now. Not-necessarily-relevant-disclaimer: I contributed the IPv6 haiku/joke at the start of Chapter 12.
If you’re interested in OpenBSD, it’s an obvious purchase. It goes into detail for all aspects of OpenBSD, starting with a very detailed conversation about installation, then disk setup, and so on. This is not going to surprise anyone, of course. Past the initial overview, the book starts with a chapter that talks about nothing else but locating other resources to help learn OpenBSD. It seems a little counter-intuitive to start a book with advice on how to look somewhere else, but it makes sense in light of the topic.
What if you aren’t using OpenBSD, at least not right now? Something I didn’t realize until I had chewed my way through most of the book was that there’s several smaller books hidden inside. The book goes very far into individual utilities. So far, in fact, that it ends up creating mini-guides about the topics within the chapters. (or entire chapters, in the case of pf.)
There’s in fact 2 chapters for pf, initial and advanced. TCP/IP gets close to 30 pages just to itself, and topics like snmpd or chroot get an introductory section that assumes nothing about your prior knowledge. These are technologies you’re using already, no matter which BSD flavor you’re dealing with.
It works as a reference. I’m going to show the aforementioned chapter 11, on TCP/IP, to my coworker who makes a confused face every time I say “link-layer protocol.” I don’t know if he’ll make it from one end to the other, but it’s a lot better than waving a hand in the air and mumbling “You should look that up on the Internet sometime.” There’s enough detail that some of the smaller sections could probably be broken out into individual books, and I daresay that’s what is happening with Lucas’s Mastery series.
It’s comprehensive, it’s readable, and you’ll find something useful in it no matter your experience level. The book is available in printed and eBook form, from the usual online stores linked at Michael W. Lucas’s site, or directly from the publisher. It’s also available through the OpenBSD Project, which then gets a cut towards development.
There’s a new BSDTalk by way of the recently-completed BSDCan 2013 event, and it’s half an hour of talk with Matt Ahrens about ZFS and matters related.
A really packed week, this week.
- Interview with Donald Knuth (via ferz on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Garry’s Mod on DragonFly. We need that linuxulator working on x86_64. (thanks, tuxillo)
- Exxon used to be in the processor business? (via)
- PDP-11 in your pocket. (via)
- I’ve mentioned before how news aggregators go in cycles: Slashdot, then Digg, then Reddit, then Hacker News, which might be reaching the peak of its cycle. (via)
- Another review of Absolute OpenBSD, 2nd Edition.
- And I don’t think I’ve noticed that Unix column before.
- Dennis Ritchie’s earliest known C compiler, now on GitHub. (via)
- Why makefiles indent target lines with a single tab character. (via EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- Computer Beach Party, with backstory and interview (via) Not recognizably Unixish.
- A very in-depth exploration of SSH keys. (via)
- The Real Origins of Tumblr. Related: I often link here to Trivium. (via many places)
- UK readers may find this ZX joke funny.
Your unrelated link of the week: Superman’s Ultimate Crotch Kick.
Sascha Wildner’s added a man page for dports. Don’t forget the existing how-to page.
SO_REUSEPORT has been added and turned on by Sepherosa Ziehau. This is an implementation of a feature found in the Linux kernel. Check the very lengthy commit message for a description of what it does.
Rados?aw Szymczyszyn has manged to get support for DragonFly’s bootloader into GRUB. This is part of his Master’s project to make DragonFly multiboot capable, at least for i386.
(I love having new things show up from new people, out of the blue.)
We’re in the picking and choosing stage of Summer of Code. I posted a note to kernel@ describing the next dates to watch for.
Loïc BLOT posted about his benchmark of several operating systems using KVM and Postgres 9.1. Happily, DragonFly is the fastest, with one exception. Linux/ext4 comes out faster – if you run it with barrier=0, which can be dangerous in a non-battery-backed-up volume.
PC-BSD now has a hardware store, with equipment known to work under PC-BSD. Chances are good that if it works for PC-BSD, it’ll work for other BSDs or could be ported to do so… (via)
New builds of dports have been uploaded and updated, for x86_64 and i386. (x86_64 was already done; I linked the note about i386) This means you can change PACKAGESITE in /usr/local/etc/pkg.conf to point at LATEST instead of RELEASE and get newer packages. ‘pkg upgrade’ is all it takes, with dports.
The May issue of BSD Magazine is out with a number of pf articles, plus others.
Super-compact links week!
- New Vim 7.4, soon. It’s mostly because the patchlevel is going to exceed 999.
- 10 Golden Rules for Making the Perfect Cup of Tea. (via I forget)
- Stop Avoiding Regular Expressions Damn It. Iffy example, but correct sentiment. (via)
- Ode to a shipping label. (via)
- The Luck of the Listserv. (via)
- Introduction to Machine Code for Beginners. (PDF) (via)
- DragonFly-specific improvements in the Phoronix test suite.
- Hand-drawn Emacs instructions, and printable. (via)
Your unrelated comics link of the week: Tom Gauld, a U.K. artist who makes some very entertaining minimal cartoons (recently published), has the best inspirational poster.