It’s been 0.25 years since the last, so pkgsrc is due for another quarterly release. The usually-two-week freeze before release starts tonight. The release should happen at the end of the month.
EuroBSDCon 2010 is happening October 8th-10th in Karlsruhe, Germany. (I’ll let you guess the year.) The Call for Papers is out now. The website lists it as “Call for Speakers“, but you have to write an abstract so I suppose that’s close enough. (via lots of places)
Venkatesh Srinivas has quoted a good phrase to sum up the work he and Matthew Dillon are doing to remove the Big Lock: ‘Less Lock, More Rock’
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.
Normally I nab a few links from Christian Neukirchen’s blog for my Messylaneous link roundups, but his latest entry has more good ones than I can steal comfortably. Go read.
- IBM’s developerWorks has an article up about GNU screen. It’s not BSD-specific, but the tips in using screen are useful. (Before someone brings it up: yes, tmux too.)
- Another article talks about inspecting network traffic using various tools including tcpdump and wireshark. It is a tremendous advantage to see what happens on a network at the most basic level, so this is a good skill to pick up.
- Oh, and “Setting up UNIX file systems” and “10 steps to Unix nirvana“.
- FreeBSD now ships with clang. (via) I know DragonFly (mostly?) works with clang… Could we switch?
- “hwstat” will gain DragonFly support soon.
- Firmware for ral(4) has been added by Joe Talbott.
- Thomas Klausner has a writeup of some project ideas or goals taken from the recent pkgsrcCon. A followup has me thinking: if the -uu option updates dependent packages with pkg_add, does that mean ‘pkg_radd -uu packagename” will do all updating possible based on available binary packages? Worth trying.
I did some cleanup on the various BSD links I have on the sidebar of this site; are there any sites I’m missing? I’d like to be as complete as possible. Please supply URLs.
(Be warned that some messages may not show up immediately because links in comments will rarely trigger the spamfilter – I’ll check for them.)
Looking for DragonFly BSD in Google will occasionally turn up wierd things: the release ISOs scattered amongst other not-so-free software, or poorly cut-and-pasted documentation in a splog. This is the oddest recently: a direct copy of the Wikipedia page on DragonFly, placed on Facebook, with a big tag at the top saying “Sign up for Facebook to connect with DragonFly BSD”.
Except there’s no DragonFly on Facebook. I assume it’s a group formed by some Facebook user. The whole “sign up to connect” item rankles me a bit; signing up for Facebook isn’t going to get you more DragonFly; it’s just going to waste your time.
Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.
Matthew Dillon’s outlined the exact steps for converting to coarse locking, and he’s looking for volunteers to convert files, according to the guidelines he described. If you’re looking for maybe two hours of work that would make a big difference, here’s your chance.
BSDTalk has a very timely interview with Roman Divácký and Ed Schouten about the switch to clang/LLVM in FreeBSD. It’s 17 minutes, recorded at the recent BSDCan 2010.
This technically is the 4,001st post. The Twitter feed is read far more than I expected, too.
I’ll update the layout to celebrate.
Matthew Dillon’s made changes again that require a full world and kernel rebuild, if you’re following the bleeding edge. There’s also discussion of the underlying principles of the token-based multiprocessor work he’s planning.
They may be low, but Sascha Wildner has documented them.
(I am making a joke that probably only makes sense to native English speakers. Sorry.)
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
The June issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the theme is: Firewalls.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.7, you will need to do a full rebuild on your next update. Matthew Dillon has made some changes because of his lwkt_token work. Making parts of DragonFly subsystems multi-processor safe should be much easier now.
Jan Lentfer has committed ldns and drill to DragonFly, in (unlikely) chance that you managed to delete BIND from pkgsrc (installed by default on 2.7+) and somehow couldn’t replace it.