A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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?
BIND has been updated by Jan Lentfer, fixing two recent vulnerabilities. His note about the update has a link to vulnerability info, for the curious. Along the same lines, Jeremy C. Reed is looking for others using DNSSEC, just to see how widespread it is.
Matthew Dillon has a summary of the development work he’s done over the past week or so. The condensed version: things faster, bugs fixed. Generally what you want to hear.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s planning to remove more old pkgsrc packages. This includes some packages like php4, which is common and also should die. There’s discussion that can be followed from the post for some details.
The economy, at least in the U.S., seems to be improving. With that in mind, I’ve seen some traffic on the freebsd-jobs mailing list lately. BSD-specific jobs are harder to come by, so take a look if you’re ‘in the market’.
Jan Lentfer’s committed support for DNSSEC. It’s supported by default, meaning you can use it right now on a 2.5.1+ system. He’s tested it locally using these instructions, which I link to for everyone’s edification. Is this important? A lot of people seem to think so.
Peter Avalos has added the HPN patch for OpenSSH; the commit message notes changes and links to a page with far more detail and acronyms than I can easily fit in a post.
I started building the pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages on several machines tonight, and I noticed something. The previous quarterly release, pkgsrc-2009Q3, had 8,969 packages. This release has 9,100. That’s right – OVER 9,000!
Still not used to typing “2010”.
There isn’t an official release announcement as of this moment, but the next quarterly release of pkgsrc is out. This is 2009Q4, meaning development happened in the 4th quarter of 2009. I’ll start binary package builds for DragonFly tonight…
I noticed some slowness when reaching this server, this morning. Logging in, there was no heavy CPU or swap usage. Looking at netstat, I saw the reason: the Department of Homeland Security was poking around.
Joerg Sonnenberger is planning to remove a number of outdated or broken packages from pkgsrc, after the next quarterly release. Speak up if you’re actively using one of those packages slated for removal.
When is that next quarterly release, anyway? It was due the 7th, as far as I know…
That didn’t take long: Matthew Dillon has an update on his REDO work; he’s about halfway there. His summary includes instructions on how to test this new work, including ways to change how Hammer syncs to disk.
Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9). This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.
I draw attention to this not because it changed anything with the games in a functional sense, but because it’s huge (450 files changed, 31450 insertions(+), 29998 deletions(-)) and because it came out of nowhere. It’s always nice to have new surprise contributions arrive.
Matthew Dillon declared his intention to have REDO working for Hammer very soon. This will improve speed by lowering the number of fsync()s needed in a given period of time to flush data to disk.
He continues in a separate message talking at length about data flushing and how to implement it efficiently, with some comparisons to work in FreeBSD. The followups are worth reading, too.
Antonio Huete Jimenez wants to find anyone working on tmpfs for DragonFly; his post about it summarizes the work so far. He’s interested in working on it, in any case.
Why, BSDTalk 184 is our very own Matthew Dillon talking about all the recent changes in DragonFly, for a good half-hour! I’ve listened to about half of it so far… I hadn’t realized the significance of some of the changes in the last two releases. It’s also strange to hear someone mentioning the work you’ve done (pkgsrc bulk builds)…
Jan Lentfer’s posted the steps to test OpenSSL encryption – I link to them because it’s interesting to see the steps spelled out.
Jan’s also posted a patch to enable DNSSEC support throughout BIND and related tools. Test if this interests you. (and it should.)