BSDTalk 194 has a conversation with D. Richard Hipp, about the Fossil “distributed software configuration management system”.
For some reason, the direct links to recent Digest articles wasn’t working on the DragonFly site’s main page. I’ve disabled it for now, but there’s always the feed here, or Twitter, or Tumblr.
Matthew Dillon posted a warning about both Samuel Greear’s kqueue work and Alex Hornung’s LVM2 work. Both are now committed to DragonFly 2.7. These are dramatic (and useful!) changes, so some instability may happen for bleeding-edge users. His post does include some minor detail on what was touched.
Joe Talbott’s ported over iwn(4), which is the “driver for Intel 1000, 5100, 5150, and 6000 wifi chipsets.”
There’s an online hackathon (the 14th!) planned for July 30th through August 2nd for pkgsrc (and probably some NetBSD material too) at FreeNode/#netbsd-code on IRC. Aleksej Saushev’s post has more details. At least it’s cheap to attend!
November 20th, 2010 is the date for BSD-Day, in Budapest. Gabor Pali has a note out inviting developer to attend and give talks. There’s more details on a FreeBSD wiki page.
Undeadly has an article up about recent work on mandoc in a mini-hackathon. It’s mentioned in context with OpenBSD in the article, but mandoc is also present in DragonFly, and is a potential groff replacement. (And I think groff is the last item in base requiring C++? I may be wrong.) Plus, as I’ve said before, I like mandoc’s output. It would be nice to use that for our online man pages, for instance.
David Shao has updated his GSoC project page on the DragonFly website. His project is updating DRM/GEM/KMS for BSD systems. It’s a huge but important piece of work. This update brings news on updates to locking systems and data structures.
Samuel J. Greear’s work on his Google Summer of Code project, unifying the select/poll/kevent subsystem into kevent, is already available for testing. Any testing – just booting, or running X, or other simple tasks – is useful, as this new system touches many things.
Sascha Wildner has set up $CCVER so that it can be used with ‘clangsvn’. If you install clang from svn into /usr/local, it’ll get picked up and used as the system compiler.
Alex Hornung has imported LVM2 from NetBSD, along with cryptsetup and dm. (Not dm(8), but devicemapper) LVM(8) stands for Logical Volume Management, and it makes storage management much easier; you may have encountered it on NetBSD or Linux. Those additional tools make it possible to encrypt volumes. Alex has published details on how to use it.
Also: Alex’s not-really-related-but-I -mistakenly-linked-to-it udev/libdevattr work.
Using ‘serno’, meaning specifying disks by serial number rather than path, is a good idea. If you have a machine that started out as an older DragonFly installation, it may be a good idea to use this feature.
I apologize; I’ve been missing. Here’s some misc links while I get back in gear:
- A very good reason to be interested in Hammer over ZFS: nobody will threaten lawsuits over Hammer.
- 10 tricks for admins. I’m posting it cause I can never remember that thing with tunneling ssh out. (via)
- This Gaming Life, as a free download. An excellent book that is in physical form on my shelf right now. Yes, unrelated.
EHCI support is now always on, for 2.7 users, and will be for 2.8 when released. It’s possible to turn it off if it causes a problem, but it should generally just mean better USB performance.
Alex Hornung recently added mkinitrd(8), a tool for building a RAM disk early in the boot process. What’s it for? It’s needed to support more interesting bootable volumes, like LVM2, encrypted disks, or iscsi roots, all of which I’d like to see.
There’s several publications with new issues out. It’s a long weekend (in the U.S.) so you can catch up on the reading/listening:
BSD Magazine has a new issue out, on OpenBSD. There’s also the happy news that they’ve managed to more than double their circulation.
The July issue of the Open Source Business Resouce is out, with the theme “Go To Market”. Next month is “Interdisciplinary Lessons”, and submissions are due in the next two weeks.
BSDTalk 192 is out with an interview of Colin Percival, the FreeBSD Security Officer. It’s another interview from BSDCan 2010. Colin Percival is also responsible for, among other things, tarsnap.com, which I find interesting because of its clear and modern business model.
Samuel Greear has a whole page about his Google Summer of Code kqueue project, recently updated.
Sometimes, packages are renamed in pkgsrc, usually because of a version change. If that happens, it can be hard to find the replacement. You can manually add them, or there’s a trick to make the build ‘jump’ to the new name.
NYCBSDCon, happening November 12-14th, in New York City, at Cooper Union, has a call for papers out. (via here and also George) They’re due by the end of July.
BSD Magazine sent out a link to all the BSD Magazine back issues, reproduced here for your enjoyment: