A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
shiningsilence.com suffered a disk failure early this morning. I’ll take the opportunity to set up a new machine, given that my local backup drive hasn’t been mounted and my remote backup went offline, in a horrible coincidence.
The disk is up and limping, which is why you can read this, but I’m still rebuilding. What motherboard/CPU/RAID/etc. parts do people recommend?
Again, lots of links. Some of these are overflow from previous weeks where I just said “That’s enough; let’s work on the next Lazy Reading.”
Your unrelated link of the week: Mighty Taco radio ads. Mighty Taco is a Mexican fast food place from Buffalo, New York, USA. It’s about as authentically Mexican as fast food from a city on the edge of Canada can be, which is ‘not much’. I’ve always loved the food, though, and the commercials are just the right mix of amateur joke and commercial advertising.
Bonus unrelated: If you enjoy imgur/fukung but it’s not youtubey enough, hit ‘Random’ on IWantMoar.com a few times. You may want to turn down your volume.
Or at least scheduled to happen now, since I’m posting this and postdating it for everyone as a reminder. I hope I have the time right.
The mailing list archives for DragonFly (lists.dragonflybsd.org) have been moved to new hardware. (Yay!) The patch that actually shows date in the listings needs to reapplied, cause Mailman is somewhat stale. (Boo!) I applied the patch and I’m regenerating all the archives now. (Yay!) There’s some garbled messages in the archives that cause a bunch of “no subject” partial messages to be dumped at the end. (Boo!) I’ll manually fix them if I can, someday. (Yay?)
Definitely Saturdays for this summary. In other BSDs this week:
Wired has an article up about Jordan Hubbard and his move from Apple to iXsystems. It’s not a bad article, though it doesn’t delve into the why of BSD very much. In any case, iXsystems has been really bulking up lately to be more than a generic hardware provider.
Speaking of which, that blade system going in now for dragonflybsd.org was sold by iXsystems.
Several parts of dragonflybsd.org are moving to a new blade server, so there may be some service interruptions during the transition.
Francois Tigeot has ported TTM to DragonFly from FreeBSD and I think a bit from OpenBSD. All this work has led to an update in the driver porting notes.
Michael W. Lucas’s next topic in his Mastery series is ‘Sudo‘.
It’s 24 minutes with Chris Cappuccio, talking about nsh and flashrd for OpenBSD.
Everyone passed their Summer of Code midterms! Not that this was a surprise; all the students have been consistently working and overcoming problems, but a 100% pass rate makes me happy.
Here’s the status reports:
On August 10th, Michael W. Lucas will be giving a talk on DNSSEC to the Metro Detroit Linux Users Group, and it’ll be livestreamed for everyone to see. His talks are energetic and entertaining, and it’s worth making time to see.
Joris Giovannangeli, one of the Summer of Code students for DragonFly, posted his thoughts on credential descriptors – have a read. He is working on capsicum and DragonFly, so this is a natural thought process.
These have been very easy to create over the last few weeks; there’s been a torrent of reading. Can I say torrent without making it sound like this is all downloaded large files? The word is overloaded. Anyway:
Your unrelated link of the week: What goes on when you are not there!
How many tags can I fit on this post? I think I’ll aim for Saturday for these BSD catchup posts. In theory, I can prep this and the Sunday Lazy Reading posts ahead of time, since they tend to be all-week items, and have the whole weekend covered.
If you have a computer with one of the very-very-new Haswell processors from Intel, Matthew Dillon has made some changes that will interest you. They shave off (in the example given) about 20% of CPU power usage without much effect on performance.
killall -T will now kill all processes associated with the current tty, except parents of the killall process itself. It’s a shortcut to “kill all these runaway items I started by accident”.
Thanks to the effort of a number of people, DragonFly (-current) now supports KMS and accelerated video on Intel 915 chipsets. It’s 2D and x86_64 only for now, but it’s much, much better than just using the vesa driver.
Every year, people ask “Why can’t writing documentation be part of Summer of Code?” (Not necessarily for DragonFly, but in general) Google has a “Doc Camp”, where a whole lot of documentation gets produced in sprints, and anyone can participate – not just Summer of Code students.
If this sounds interesting to you, your application has to be in by August 7th 9th. (URL and date updated)
Please welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Johannes Hofmann. He earned this by coming up with a significant chunk of DragonFly’s upcoming KMS/915 support, and it’s now easier to just have him work directly than to be constantly committing for him.