A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
A bunch of small things to catch up on:
Stathis Kamperis has written up a description of the test framework he designed during the Summer of Code. It may end up in DragonFly, which seems like a good idea to me. It’s designed to be generally operating-system independent. He includes a link to the git repo where he’s keeping it now.
Can you think of something that:
Francois Tigeot reports having used vkernels in production quite successfully to isolate some legacy software, even though vkernels were only planned as a development tool. Nice to hear of something being more useful than intended.
There are now official but experimental git repositories of pkgsrc available. One’s already available for DragonFly, but either should work.
Details of the new release are found in the announcement, including some biggies like KDE4. I’m building binaries for this release, for DragonFly i386/2.4, i386/2.5, and amd64/2.5. (Though the 2.5 binaries for amd64 should work on the amd64 2.4 release, too.)
Luiz Gustavo made a screencast for the DragonFly installation process. It’s 15 minutes long, requires Flash, and it would probably help if you speak Portuguese. I like seeing videos like these; multiple media always make for more fun.
Stathis Kamperis has ported POSIX message queues to DragonFly (from NetBSD) and has his eyes set on veriexec next.
The release announcement isn’t out, but the branch is there. I’m building it for DragonFly 2.4 and DragonFly 2.5 on i386 now, so we should have binary packages in about a week. I should have reports to go with it.
If you use NFS, especially with vkernels, you may be interested in the latest round of NFS changes recently committed.
The next quarterly release of pkgsrc should be released by next week. Normally it is released 2 weeks after starting a freeze period, but this release was slightly delayed for some structural changes and for KDE4.
Matthew Dillon solved a performance problem that was most noticeable when doing intensive I/O while performing other tasks; downloading a large collection of files while opening another application that read a lot of initial data, for example, would have a noticeable startup delay. His recent VM change seems to have solved it, and the commit message has an in-depth explanation of how.
Sdävtaker has reported success booting DragonFly on a Clevo TN120R, which is almost more of a tablet/nettop than a laptop.
Two items, picked from RSS feeds:
Greg Troxel, on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list, shared a script he wrote for automatic maintenance/update/cleanup of his installed pkgsrc packages, via pkg_rolling-replace.
Alex Hornung has added support for a bunch of hardware to enable a Soekris 5501 to run DragonFly. We now have a watchdog and gpio framework as a side effect.
The October issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with Arts and Media as the theme. The article about film production using open-source tools is especially good, as articles like that tend to be a list of application names only, while this article goes into the whys and wherefores.
Sdävtaker has created a new blog, similar in design to this one, at http://dfbsd.trackbsd.org.ar/. It’s in Spanish!
It’s been mentioned before, but it’s moved: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA graphics driver that works on DragonFly.
Mentioned here for completeness: tcsh has been updated, along with libarchive and opencrypto.