Seen via email and Hubert Feyrer’s blog: There’s a NetBSD hackathon planned for February 19th through the 22nd. The meetup is via IRC. Since it’s NetBSD, it’ll include pkgsrc, and if it includes pkgsrc, it affects DragonFly. If you’re interested, show up – even being there to report on packages that compile or don’t (on DragonFly) would help.
That was fast – there’s another BSDTalk already! BSDTalk 186 has Jeff Roberson, FreeBSD committer. He’s talking about schedulers and softupdates for a good half hour.
Jan Lentfer has updated wpa_supplicant and hostapd, and while there’s already some postive reports, he’d like more testing in the wild. Give it a run if you’re already using the prior version.
The first online-only free version of BSD Magazine is out! It’s good, but there’s no DragonFly, darnit. Anyway, it’s worth reading if for no other reason than it’s in pleasant, colorful PDF format.
James Nixon, iXsystems employee and PC-BSD developer, is interviewed for 16 minutes on BSDTalk 185.
I’m really behind on my posting (this is why), so I’m piling a lot of stuff in here:
- Yoinked from #dragonflybsd/EFNet IRC: Hiding sentences in IPv6 addresses.
- Red Hat did it: opensource.com. Good articles, but your eyeballs may get fatigued from reading the word ‘open’ too many times.
- Technically, this should have animated spacewar, not pong.
- Hypergit, a git plugin for vim, with a contextual menu. (via I forget) Also, digerati, a color scheme for both vim and terminal. (via)
- The Winter 2010 edition of the BSDA study DVD is out.
- Hey, this is vaguely like what Matt’s doing with disk cache. Well, not really, but it’s a good idea.
- More Crawlapalooza at @Play.
- The February issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with this issue’s theme being “startups”.
Matthew Dillon is setting up DragonFly to be able to use a fast disk (like a SSD) for disk cache, reducing the effect swap has on speed. This means very large amounts of data could be read into memory – greater than the available RAM in the system – without having the normal paging out problems that happen when memory is exhausted. It’ll work for any filesystem on the machine – HAMMER, UFS, or NFS. His inital notes have more. Other notes include details on the NFS benefits, and possibilities with SSDs. Wear-leveling may make SSDs last much longer.
Work has started, and there’s an update (with examples) that people can try, though it may destroy all your data at this point. Test results in that update show, if I’m reading it right, a better than doubling of speed on a repeated md5 test on a large file when using the new caching system. This should be a huge benefit.
The packages from a bulk build of pkgsrc-2009Q4, on DragonFly 2.5.1 for x86_64 have all been uploaded to avalon.dragonflybsd.org. Go ahead and upgrade using pkg_radd if you’ve got the right hardware for it.
Thanks to some work by Tim Darby, the SiI 3124 SATA controller is now supported. This, like other SiI devices, should be able to handle hotplugging…
Vincent Stemen has a compiled version of the Linux Test Project available to download and run for anyone interested in helping linuxulator progress. Note that this is not a coding exercise, but rather a reporting exercise, so that we can identify what needs work in the linuxulator.
It’s been available to build for some time, but the official announcement for pkgsrc-2009Q4 is out. It’s worth reading to see what new packages pushed it over the 9,000 mark.
Michael Neumann presented a talk on HAMMER at the Karlsruher Institut
für Technologie on January 27th. His slides (in English) are now available in PDF or ODP formats, and are listed on the dragonflybsd.org Presentations page.
Google Summer of Code for 2010 is accepting applications from mentor organizations starting March 8th. Pending acceptance by Google, DragonFly will participate.
If you’ve got ideas, or if you want to mentor (or both!), enter something on the GSOC 2010 page on the DragonFly website.
A fresh set of pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.5.x/i386 are ready, and already available on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. pkg_radd will fetch them.
There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!
- Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it. He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on the way too.
- Binary pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.4.x/i386 are all uploaded.
- I finished a build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.5.x/x86_64 – take a look and fix some of the broken items, if that interests you.
- Weekend reading: check out this Trivium post as there’s some interesting historical items. I may try that LackRack idea in a environment that doesn’t fit a normal rack well…
A build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.4/i386 is complete, and uploading now to avalon.dragonflybsd.org. When the upload’s done, I’ll change the symlink so that pkg_radd downloads from the new collection. Builds for x86_64 and 2.5 will be done soon.
There’s a couple packages – lang/mono, devel/boost-libs – that can be fixed with some updates; I’ll do so next chance I get.
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5 and updated in the past week or so, and have UFS disks, there’s some instability introduced by Matthew Dillon’s recent work. It ought to be better by next week.
Users of Hammer, or of UFS only as /boot, don’t have anything to worry about.
It’s been possible for some time to automatically check for vulnerabilities in installed pkgsrc packages. However, it requires some initial setup work. NetBSD now will check automatically if there’s any packages installed. The same feature could work in DragonFly – I have a post about that even links to the appropriate changes. Someone want to take this on?