Good news: the upcoming 2.8 release (that’s next month!) of DragonFly will be missing the Big Giant Lock from a significant part of its structure, and will be removed completely somewhere in 2.9. Recent commits bear this out.
There’s a podcast titled “The BSD Show!”, which I didn’t know. What’s more, it has 15 minutes of Warner Losh speaking about FreeNAS. That’s the 4th broadcast so far. (via)
(added it to the links, too)
Thanks to the efforts of Venkatesh Srinivas, tmpfs file systems on DragonFly can now withstand fsstress testing. Thanks, Venkatesh!
(One of the benefits of posting about people’s work is that the names are fun to type.)
Jim Brown asked about using the DragonFly logo, and as part of his request described (slightly) the BSD Professional certification exam, and how they are testing.
Two things:
- If you are running DragonFly 2.7, Matthew Dillon has made some kernel changes, so updating your 2.7 machine will require a full buildworld cycle, not quickworld.
- The binary packages for 2.6 and 2.7 have been updated to pkgsrc-2010Q2. This means that pkg_radd will automatically pull down newer packages, and you should make sure your /usr/pkgsrc is using the pkgsrc-2010Q2 release if you want to be sure there’s no version mismatches.
I recently sent out a description of what built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 , though the section on not changing the stable link is no longer true.
Anyone want to implement TCP-MD5? (RFC2385, among others.) David BÉRARD would find it useful.
Sevan Janiyan sent along news of a London *BSD meetup happening on August 26th, at The Cleveland Arms in Bayswater, starting at 7 PM.
Of course, you already knew because you watch the BSDEvents feed, don’t you? Well, you should.
Nikolai Lifanov has created a DragonFly hosting service. It’s vkernel-based, with a variety of options in disk and RAM. It’s at http://dflyhost.net/. (added to the links here, too)
Link dumps just so I can get caught up.
- Michael Lucas was interviewed about his new Network Flow Analysis (previously reviewed) book, in two parts. Also, he’s speaking at NYCBSDCon, this November 12th-14th.
- Dru Lavigne gave a talk on “Getting Started in an Open Source Community“. (via) In other video news, MeetBSD 2010 videos are available now.
- Random Google searches turned up a DragonFly installation video on Via hardware.
- Back to convention items: Kirk Russell has a short BSDCan recap. (via)
- Also, cluster ssh.
- Stathis Kamperis updated DragonFly’s One True Awk. (Huh. Brian Kernighan’s not at Bell Labs anymore.)
Matthew Dillon posted a summary of recent bugfixes in HAMMER and kqueue, which means if you are running a version of bleeding edge DragonFly build in the last few weeks, you should update.
He also mentions a “significant improvement in performance” in disk encryption. How significant? Over three times as fast.
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Samuel J. Greear has been posting news while I was off somewhere in Lake Huron. I didn’t fix it to show proper credits, for which I apologize. He’s done a wonderful job, however, and his name is now shown correctly on his posts.
I now get to actually read the past week’s Digest for recent news, for the first time ever.
Matthew Dillon made a minor change to HAMMER that would help any future deduplication work. There’s also a deduplication code bounty out on the recently-updated Code Bounties page…
I’ve been NAS-shopping, and I’ve found that deduplication ability seems to add an extra zero on the end of a device’s price tag. It would be very nice for HAMMER.
Binary packages built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 are available now via pkg_radd or directly. Make sure to read my lengthy post for exact details.
On pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org, Greg Troxel proposed getting rid of gimp-print and associated packages. It’s been superseded by gutenprint-lib, so it may be worth switching now for the newer printer drivers, even if the package isn’t eliminated.
Matthew Dillon’s updated his iphdr branch of DragonFly, and he’s looking for testers. In this version, IP headers aren’t switched to host byte order, reducing complexity. If you like transmitting data, this would be a good one to test.
I almost had an all-acronym title, darnit.
- Theodore T’so’s writing about SSDs. It’s Linuxish, so not all the problems he finds would apply to DragonFly, but interesting in the detail level.
- The WordPress Theme Fiasco. (via) I link just so I can say that BSD licensing certainly takes away some of these headaches.
- How to get Vim to highlight HACK the same as XXX.
- How many books are there in the world? (via) I find this strangely interesting, probably cause I like books.
- 10 Great Unix Tools (via).
- The oldest web page, via Prof. Dr. Style, also a good read. I still reflexively assume web links that contain a ~ must be more authentic and personal than any other. (via).
Jan Lentfer’s looking for code review; specifically these patches. It’s for pfsync and carp, part of his recent pf upgrade.
Dru Lavigne has listed conventions she’ll be at over the next few months, so if you feel like taking a BSDA exam or just plain helping out at a BSD booth, check the list.
Jan Lentfer has updated pf (and pflogd and ftp-proxy) in DragonFly to match what was in OpenBSD 4.1. Why this intermediate step? pf went through a lot of changes after OpenBSD 4.1, so this was easier than jumping right to the current version – which he plans next.
In any case, this was a huge and difficult job, with somewhere around 10,000 lines of code added, and very useful for DragonFly. Jan also managed to keep the DragonFly-specific features working, where “no state” is the default, along with features like fairq.