Debian squished with DragonFly, sorta like Debian/kFreeBSD? Don’t know if it will work, but what the heck.
As I typed elsewhere, my general plan is to branch DragonFly 3.2 on the 8th, and release on the 22nd. That should give the recent scheduler and gcc work a chance to settle, and perhaps get a new version of USB support in too. It will probably be using pkgsrc-2012Q3, also, though we may not have binary i386 packages. 3.2 is shaping up to be a much more significant release than I expected.
John Marino has accomplished the difficult task of putting gcc 4.7 into DragonFly. Version 4.4 is still the default, and the older 4.1 version has been disabled. If you want to try this newer version, setting WORLD_CCVER=gcc47 will build kernel and world that way too. If you’re curious about what’s different in this version of gcc, there’s a 4.7 changelog.
Are we the only BSD with this new a version in base? I think so.
P.S.: You’ll want to do a full buildworld if you’re running DragonFly 3.1
P.P.S.: you may need to put ‘NO_GCC47=true’ in make.conf, going from IRC comments.
P.P.P.S.: Nope, now it’s fine.
Pkgsrc-2012Q3 is out, and there’s an extensive release announcement to go with it. It’s worth reading; there’s a few packages that will not be supported after this quarter’s release, and a whole lot of new ones.
The machine that runs www.dragonflybsd.org and bugs.dragonflybsd.org is currently down. While it gets figured out, Alex Hornung has a static copy of the dragonflybsd.org main website available.
It’s been an extremely busy week for me, but I still have a batch of links here.
- Thomas Klausner sent a link to some very pretty images of real dragonflies.
- Datacenter details, from Metafilter. I’ve been in places like that, and so has my brother.
- Bug report humor. (related to Ubuntu ads, previously linked here.)
- Sometimes this site/my domain gets weird spam. I got different versions of this SEO spam recently. No story here, just a thing that I’ve seen others fall for.
- Honoring Bill Moggridge. He designed the first laptop, pictured in that article. It looks like my memory of the Apple ][c, which is probably not an accident.
- It’s always nice to see mentions of DragonFly show up in Linuxish places.
- No, really. Use zsh. That’s the article’s title, not necessarily my recommendation. (via)
- Michael W. Lucas talks about logging only sudo failures. It’s mentioned in a throwaway paragraph, but he also makes the excellent security point of having a separate, inaccessible-to-most logging host.
Your unrelated link of the week: Did you know one of the original ideas was to name DragonFly “TortoiseBSD” “TurtleBSD”? Probably not the best name.
Sepherosa Ziehau has some suggestions for anyone looking for some kernel hacking. They’re mostly based around busdma(9).
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down right now so I’m linking to the MARC kernel@ post.
There’s a post on the mailing list tech-pkg@netbsd.org of currently broken packages for the next quarterly release. It’s not a lot of stuff, but if something you need is on there, don’t worry too much. If you follow the thread through its replies, there’s a lot of fixing going on.
Sascha Wildner’s added updatesfrom FreeBSD for the Areca arcmsr(4) driver; specifically for the ARC-1213, ARC-1223 and ARC-1882 models.
Remember how I pointed at BSDEvent’s collection of slides from 3 different BSD conventions? Well, now’s it is a lot more conventions. As in multiple years of convention slides.
MARC, which stands for Mailing list ARChives, has a lot of mailing lists. It now includes the DragonFly users@ list, along with the others. (It’s not linked in *BSD on the main MARC page yet, but it should be soon.) It’s worth digging through the massive, massive wall of text on that page to find a mailing list you didn’t know existed.
Google Code-In 2012 has been announced. I’m not going to be able to coordinate it for DragonFly this year… anyone want to step up?
This latest commit for the new scheduler means that on your next update, you will want to build a new kernel, and probably a new world too. This only applies if you’re running DragonFly 3.1, of course.
The weather is finally turning cooler, which makes me happy.
- I don’t think I’ve seen this before: Very old UNIX releases, listed for running in emulation. (via)
- Where the red-black tree name came from. A red-black tree underpins Hammer 1’s data structures, though it does not in Hammer 2. (also via)
- Someone with a HP passport login want to help this guy? He just needs to reinstall Windows in IDE mode, or perhaps find the right sysctl to toggle.
- The acme editor, from Plan 9. I didn’t realize it’s 20 years old.
- Speaking of editors, Replace in Multiple Files with Vim. I haven’t seen the argdo command before, or the Vim Ninjas site. Their color schemes article is useful just for the screenshots. (via)
- Adbuntu. It’s not as bad or as inconsequential as most reactions would lead you to believe, but advertising within an OS seems heavy-handed. The BSD model has been to use the operating system as a vehicle for selling hardware, and that’s been much more successful. (see iOS, PC-BSD.)
- Where Did the Internet Come From?
- The map for Adventure. (via)
Your unrelated link of the day: Victorian Sci-Fi. It’s not just a reference list, it’s a link to a lot of the original material, since copyright no longer applies.
I got the old mailing list archives converted to Mailman. As I wrote in a post to users@, please let me know about problems. There’s some garbled messages from the old archive that were placed into the 2012-Sept. section for each message; I’ll be cleaning those up manually.
The old mailing list software for @dragonflybsd.org mailing lists, bestserv, apparently allowed people not subscribed to a list to post to it, after answering a confirmation message for each message posted.
The closest way to duplicate that for Mailman is to sign up for the list you want, and then turn off mail delivery for your email address in the config page for that mailing list. This won’t affect a lot of people, since most people want list output in their mailbox, but there’s at least a few I’ve fixed that way.
BSD Events linked to the presentations for FOSDEM 2012, BSD-Day Europe 2012, and BSDCan 2012. There’s a lot of reading there for you – and even some video.
The combination of Mihai Carabas’s successful Summer of Code work on the scheduler and the recent Postgres benchmarking got Matthew Dillon to start thinking about making UNIX domain sockets work better, a shortcut around the buffer cache, scheduler improvements and then a new default scheduler, along with a change in idle CPU behavior. The best place to understand all the changes is in his long post to users@.
We should have benchmarks soon to show the performance improvements from all this.
Smartmontools will catch impending disk failures about 2/3 of the time, so it’s useful to run it and interpret the results. The results can be somewhat complex, though. However, it can be useful to look at other people talking about the output and glean knowledge from the context.
A discussion of why root automatically lists dotfiles with ls and all other users do not led to a long thread that includes some UNIX history. There’s some useful and some not-so-useful parts in the thread, but it did indirectly produce a way to reverse the listing effect itself.