Justin Sherrill – Page 259 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2010/06/112010/06/11

Facebook and DragonFly, but not on purpose

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.

2010/06/11

Welcome new commiter: Venkatesh Srinivas

Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.

2010/06/10

Specific steps for multiprocessing

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.

2010/06/10

New BSDTalk: clang clang clang

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.

2010/06/09

Holy crap, 4,000 posts!

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.

2010/06/092010/06/09

Recompile again, plus multiprocessing details

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.

2010/06/08

Standards: we got ’em

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.)

2010/06/07

More pcc notes

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.

2010/06/07

BSD Magazine: Firewalls

The June issue of BSD Magazine is out, and the theme is: Firewalls.

2010/06/06

Structure changes means recompilation

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.

2010/06/06

Extra DNS tools

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.

2010/06/04

Mandoc, mdocml, and usage

There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.

2010/06/03

How to get more wireless drivers

Joe Talbott wants to write DragonFly/BSD drivers for a whole slew of wireless devices. These are also all the adapters he doesn’t physically have. You can fix this by purchasing something off that page, which will ship right to him. A bwi(4) driver is next, for instance.

2010/06/02

Software additions: proplib, wpi, ioprio

A bunch of new things arrived today:

Alex Hornung ported NetBSD’s proplib to DragonFly.
Joe Talbott ported FreeBSD’s wpi(4) driver, for Intel 3945ABG wi-fi adapters.
Sascha Wildner renamed ionice to ioprio. That’s not strictly new, but worth mentioning so nobody thinks it was misplaced.

2010/06/022010/06/02

bmake(1)ing a list, checking it twice

I found this reference list of targets for bmake very useful, especially because I can never remember them all. Unfortunately, the site where it’s located appears to be going away at the end of the month, but it should resurface on a new NetBSD wiki.

2010/06/01

BSDTalk 190: Michael Lucas

BSDTalk 190 has 20 minutes of conversation with Michael Lucas, one of my favorite authors, about his new book, “Network Flow Analysis“. He is also responsible for other BSD books.

2010/06/01

June OSBR: Growing Business

The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and it has a number of articles about growth and open source. It’s a mix of “how-to” and “how-we-did” articles.

2010/05/31

dragonflybsd.org upgrade

www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.

2010/05/30

GEM and KMS progress for GSoC

Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.

2010/05/30

Things to eat up your day

It’s a holiday weekend, at least in the United States, so I’m posting few things that take time to view.

Murray Stokely mentioned this in a comment, but it’s juicy enough to warrant a post: the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube has all 17 of the recent AsiaBSDCon 2010 presentations, plus a lot more from other conferences.

Phil Foglio, the fellow who drew the original BSD Daemon, has several comics strips, all of which are available for free – Buck Godot (complete), MythAdventures (in progress), What’s New with Phil and Dixie (in progress), and Girl Genius (in progress and in print).