Sepherosa Ziehau continues his relentless network feature improvement/porting: this time, adding the ability for DragonFly to recognize more varieties of Broadcom hardware.
Apparently, if you are running IPv6, and using radvd (Linux)/rtadvd (BSD) to autoconfigure your hosts with IPv6 addresses, you need to tell your DragonFly hosts to accept this.
If you’re running 64-bit DragonFly, and you’re on version 2.11, you will want to rebuild with the latest sources. Peter Avalos found a bug with file descriptor passing, and Venkatesh Srinivas fixed it. It will require a quickworld/kernel build – maybe a full buildworld and kernel? I’m not sure. Some pkgsrc packages might need recompilation, too if they also passed file descriptors around.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot more changes to the msk(4) driver for Marvell Ethernet chipsets. I link to this commit adding support for Yukon Supreme cards, but there’s a great deal of work from him, recently added.
Sascha Wildner has committed version 3.981 of the mfi(4) driver, for a variety of LSI MegaRAID SAS 92XX devices. Read the commit message for details on the model numbers.
Thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez, there’s now an explanation in the vkernel(7) man page on how to netboot virtualized DragonFly kernels.
This is a shorter version of a Lazy Reading post, but it’s linking to some extensive writing. Yay for having other people make up for my brevity!
- Here’s part two of the excellently written story of @. Again, interesting because it mentions ASCII, and its unlamented predecessor BCDIC, among other things. Read part 1 if you missed it.
- Stephen Ramsay’s blog – the most recent items are about command line usage. There’s some gems to glean from there, like Jekyll. (via)
- Learn Perl in about 2 hours 30 minutes. The world needs more tutorials like this, or else this.) (also via)
- Obsessive detail over emulation. (via)
- Hey, that’s a good idea for passwords.
Your unrelated link of the day: the comics of Lucy Knisley. (follow the ‘Previous’ links for more)
Well, if you tell it to do so. Matthew Dillon has added a user-settable limit to the amount of memory used during deduplication, so if your Hammer-using system is low on RAM, you can conserve. This is probably most useful if you are running DragonFly in an extremely small VM, or if your name is Venkatesh.
(inside joke; Venkatesh has a crazy old desktop for DragonFly.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for a wider range of Marvell network interfaces; specifically the chips on board, not just card models. If you’ve got the right chips but they aren’t working for you, you know what to do.
Samuel Greear posted a progress report on his kqueue Summer of Code project. There’s code available now to try it out. It sounds grand, though I can’t identify what effects it will have for the end user.
CVS has traditionally been used to distribute the files in pkgsrc, but there’s been a converted git version for DragonFly for a bit now. It looks like there is now an official version (i.e. for everyone, maybe to replace CVS?) at Github.
Sepherosa Ziehau has, over the last few months, effectively completed the “Update ACPI and interrupt routing” code bounty on the DragonFly code bounties page. Yay! I’m on the hook for the $50 I pledged towards that… (it’s already off the page; here’s the change if you want to see it.)
I’m a bit slow in reporting this, but: BSD Magazine for August is out in free PDF form. The theme article is memory file systems, but there’s all sorts of stuff, including an article from me talking about how I set up bulk builds of pkgsrc.
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource magazine is out, talking about starting open-source based businesses. It also announces a name change, to “Technology Innovation Management Review”. The reason, according to the editor, is that the original purpose of the magazine was to explain how you could make money creating or using open source software. People seem to have figured that out now…
The question now is how do you make your (probably open source using) business grow. I totally believe that now based on the number of businesses that have sprung up based around open source software; it used to be much harder to find a commercial backer for a project that let you see the source code. Now, it’s practically commonplace. (examples added off the top of my head.)
We went from feast to famine, and now back to feast. grok.v12.su is back up and running, for your source comparison needs. It complements the one at pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org – plus it still contains source for multiple operating systems.
Note/update: grok.v12.su is having some problems keeping Tomcat running, so your mileage may vary…
EuroBSDcon 2011, which is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands 2011/10/6 to 2011/10/9, is now open for registration. This is the 10th anniversary!
I’m throwing this in as a late update as I catch up on what happened while I was on the road last week.
- Venkatesh Srinivas is doing The Right Thing and making sure patches get applied to the original software, not just in pkgsrc. (bitcoin, in this case.) Thanks!
- Hey, more reviews (they agree with mine) for Practical Packet Analysis, from other No Starch authors.
- RetroBSD: a tiny version of BSD, based on 2.11BSD and running on MIPS hardware, is available. That was the one that ran on PDP-11 systems, so the small footprint is no surprise. (According to the site) It uses a tenth of the memory, can run its own C compiler, and can fork. Apparently uClinux can’t do any of those things.
Your unrelated link for the day: Rotate Your Owl. (via)
BSDTalk 207 is 15 minutes of conversation with Mohammed Farrag about ArabBSD. It’s good to see open source being supported in a part of the world I daresay has been underserved. This is the Internet, so I say that without supporting evidence, of course.
(I have a lot of catching up to do; more posts soon.)
Posted in the past, for the future. I always build these up over the week, so if the links seem dated (as in more than 24 hours old), that’s why. My commentary will add the flavor.
- This NYT story about Dwarf Fortress has been linked lots of places, but I want to point out the one paragraph:
Growing up, Tarn was enamored of Dungeons & Dragons and J.R.R. Tolkien, but he has never been a lockstep member of the geek culture so much as a wanderer on the fringes. He didn’t read superhero comics as a kid, and later, he never became obsessed with the “Game of Thrones” books, say, or with “Lost.”
Are you over 35 or so? Then maybe you remember a time when there wasn’t a designated ‘Geek Culture’. It’s something specific to a period in time, like when pay phones were still common, or when people were on average still thin. It strikes me that the interviewer assumes that a computer programmer should become consumed with a TV media event; that it’s part of what makes them what they are. It’s as if all accountants need to have brown shoes, and all artists have to wear berets and ‘get’ abstract art. Maybe I’m just hipster complaining.
- “...while Bell Labs’ parent company AT&T flatly refused to believe that packet switching would ever work” – Have I linked to Shady Characters before? I think so. Anyway, this is part 1 about the @ sign, and it’s of course talking about email and the early days of the Internet, back when it was the ARPANet. Be sure to check the references at the end of the article; it contains gems like this ad for a 65-pound portable TTY.
- Tim Paterson has a blog. DOS is his fault. Worth reading, for the early hardware details. (via ftigeot on #dragonflybsd)
- Removing the Internet’s relics. An article about how FTP should die. It will… once there’s no place where it’s needed. Like gopher!
- Comparisons like this are usually cheesy, but this one made me laugh: Text editors as Lord of the Rings locations.
A not-yet-finished guide to setting up software RAID on DragonFly has appeared on the site from user ‘Markus’. Read and/or add to it if you are interested; I have always favored having RAID controlled by separate hardware, but this question on using software comes up repeatedly.