This is the BSD-licensed version of libiberty, which was removed because it didn’t ever actually make it to being a replacement.
As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow. If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.
There’s a DragonFly BSD group on identi.ca, the not-as-creepy-as-Facebook social site.
APIC support has been updated, so not only will some machines work better/at all with a multiprocessor kernel, more machines will boot. Not only that, but Sepherosa Ziehau has a newer version of ACPI and interrupt routing available. This is wonderful news! We’ve needed this update for some time.
My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available. Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change. I’m starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.
The Daemon & Penguin podcast has a new 50-minute podcast about GhostBSD, a FreeBSD/Gnome install, and a review of the horror movie Parasomnia.
For the curious, or for those who plan ahead, I posted what’s on the Google Summer of Code student application for DragonFly.
This all came together at the last second.
- The DragonFly Doji – unrelated, but I like the juxtaposition.
- I found it interesting to read this vinyl enthusiast magazine (PDF) and contrast it to BSD Magazine as a narrow-focus publication. (via)
- Self-publishing a technical book. (via) Compare and contrast this with repeat BSD author Michael Lucas’s recent note about not wanting to self-publish.
- Along those same lines,the Electronic Publishing Bingo Card. (via)
- Some more fun code stories, this time involving Ultima Underworld. (One of the Ultimas I did not get to play.)
If you were thinking of working on a disk scheduler for DragonFly, this is your lucky day! Brills Peng asked for some overall guidance on how to start on a Summer of Code project. I threw out some general tips, Alex Hornung talked up resources on kernel programming, and Venkatesh Srinivas described exactly what you’d need to write a disk scheduler. There’s about 50% of a whole proposal, prewritten.
We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year! (yay!)
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
If you want to mentor, apply here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.) I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. Signing up to mentor does not mean you must mentor if there aren’t any projects that interest you; it does mean you need to review applications and provide feedback for students March 28th – April 8th.
If you want to be a student with DragonFly:
Check the projects page for ideas:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/
… or come up with your own.
Get your application together by March 28th. Start talking about it on the mailing list or IRC or however as soon as you can; there’s a direct relationship between the amount of preparation we see beforehand and people getting accepted.
Here’s the timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline
Copied from my email to users@/kernel@, cause it has everything you need.
The newest BSDTalk has a roughly 15-minute talk with Dan Langille about the upcoming 2011 BSDCan and PGCon events.
This shouldn’t be a surprise considering recent events: AsiaBSDCon 2011 has had some event cancellations; specifically the tutorials and meetings. The paper presentations starting on the 19th, and the banquet, are still on, however. (via)
Google Search turned up something new: Daemon & Penguin oggcast. It’s a podcast, with every episode covering something Unix-ish – usually BSD. Each episode also reviews a horror movie. It’s not a mix I would have predicted, but I can see how it would work. The first oggcast has him installing DragonFly.
Samuel Greear has been working on a module to translate Hammer snapshots into Windows-style shadow copies, so a Hammer volume’s snapshots would be accessible when shared to a Windows machine, or anything that understood shadow copies, so Samba.
He’s put up his work so far; it’s not finished, but he has schoolwork to get to and wants to make it available for anyone who wants to run with it. (say, for Summer of Code…) Apparently the macros in the shadow_copy2 or onefs modules are similar to what a Hammer module would need…
A new page has popped up on the DragonFly website: How to Port to DragonFly. The work is very thorough, and the author is ‘srussell’, which I think is Stéphane Russell? Thanks, person who I may be misidentifying!
Edit: corrected name spelling
Nice big pile of links this week. Enjoy the reading, especially if you’re still recovering from St. Patrick’s Day festivities. (does that happen outside of the U.S.?)
- I like this “Insufficiently known POSIX shell features” item, because too many of the shell tutorials out there assume you have bash. (via)
- The decline and fall of disk storage prices, summarizing this. Oh, I hope this trend continues. (via)
- Michael Lucas’s disaster and recovery with OpenBSD.
- Sometimes the Internet produces things I can’t ever have thought would exist. Loom-weaved reproductions of Apple 2 game loading screens, complete with crack notice. The image linked is Castle Smurfenstein. (via)
- I had no idea how much DNS prefetching could affect the network. (via)
- Saved Google searches for DragonFly sometimes turn up things I didn’t know about. For example, it appears DragonFly is regularly tested in FFmpeg builds. That’s great! I mentally expect to be left out.
- Open source work == more job opportunities. (via) This is absolutely true, and not just talking about Web 2.0 style companies. I recently hired a junior admin at my workplace. I went through I think 80 resumes and a pile of phone and in-person interviews; if even one of them had listed open-source work, they would have moved to the front of the line – just because it meant they did more.
- PGCon 2011 is coming up, for Postgres users – conveniently right after BSDCan 2011, and in the same location, which is because Dan Langille is working on both.
- Remember how XFCE only supports udev on Linux and nothing else, because it’s too hard to follow the conflicting and changing plans on Linux device support? There’s larger messes. (via this and that) I would suggest that when an organization says “There’s a problem here and that’s the way this works” instead of “There’s a problem; let’s adapt and fix” is a sign of stagnation.
Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wish I knew more about kqueue!” Well, here’s a link (PDF) from Vlad GALU that can help with that.
dragonflybsd.org is down right now, so if you’re looking for the Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly, I have a local mirror of that page.
Update: dragonflybsd.org is back up, but I’ll keep that mirror there just in case…
This month’s issue of BSD Magazine is titled “The Wonders of Blender”, but there’s a lot more articles in there with other topics. There’s a two-page spread of DragonFly news that may look familiar to readers of this site…
The GIF format, or rather the LZW format it uses, is no longer patent-encumbered. (GIF patent worries led to the creation of the PNG format, if I’m not mistaken) Matthias Drochner has changed pkgsrc to use giflib instead of libungif.
According to Wikipedia, the patent expired more than 5 years ago, so this isn’t really news other than some packages need to be rebuilt. Still, memories of the general Internet Outrage from a decade ago are interesting compared to the events of today.