For those people who use a variety of dynamic languages, but haven’t yet hit C: Just Enough C For Open Source Projects has a brief but comprehensive run through the basic parts. The page linked is about the presentation, but the slides are available on there as a tarball. (Via) I could have used this a few days ago.
The latest @Play column talks not about specific roguelikes, but rather programming them, delving into python programming. It’s a new level of nerdy.
Google has published some inital statistics from the 2009 midterms. This covers all Summer of Code projects, not just DragonFly.
Remember, projects are due August 17th at the very latest.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2009Q2, is out. The release announcement has details on what’s new.
Peter Avalos has made it possible for TCP buffers to be automatically sized according to need, which improves performance when latency goes up. It’s already in.
The system leaf.dragonflybsd.org, where developer accounts are located, has had a significant bump in CPU and RAM, and has the newest scripts for automated vkernel setup.
As always, leaf accounts are available for anyone who wants to develop something on DragonFly, independent of commit access.
Release 2.3.2 has been tagged, for anyone who wants to stick with DragonFly past the current release but before the recent radical changes to NFS. Check the commit message for a summary of what’s changed since 2.3.1, taken from the commit messages.
Well, default as of the next release. With the recent changes to NFS, TCP will be needed in most circumstances. It’s still possible to force UDP if desired with the ‘mntudp’ option, or ‘udp’ if you’re using a 2.3.x system.
It is now possible to mount a Hammer PFS via NFS, though you’ll want to use NFSv3.
Entertaining weekend reading: Practical Reusable Unix Software in PDF form, from AT&T. (Via)
Peter Avalos has updated gzip, with a far longer list of updates than I would have thought possible with a utility that’s been around for a while.
Matthew Dillon made some major changes to NFS, which have greatly improved speed. He’s also made the clients able to write asychronously, which can overwhelm a server because of this increased throughput. Be careful.
Hey, look at what Michael Neumann’s doing: making Hammer expandable! It will be possible to expand your Hammer volumes while online, even.
(note: it’s experimental; don’t be surprised if it destroys data.)
DragonFly has its first 10G network driver, mxge(4), for the Myricom Myri10GE. Aggelos Economopoulos ported it from FreeBSD. Check his post for notes and credits for the people who helped out.
Michael Neumann has removed the PRISON_ROOT flag, and has changed jail(8) code to use only prison_priv_check() to check for allowed operations. This won’t mean anything from a user standpoint, but it does make programming easier.
pipe(2) is now MPSAFE, meaning it can take advantage of multiple processors without the Giant Lock. Matthew Dillon published some before-and-after stats in his commit.
(This is off-topic) The National Center for the History of Electronic Games has opened at a museum in my town. They are looking for donations, so if you have old game equipment around that you want to see get a second life, contact them.
The collection there is already huge (15K games), and visitors get to play whatever games they have on display. In my last visit, I played the arcade versions of Gauntlet, the standing and sitting versions of Star Wars, and Battlezone. It was awesome in a way that may only be apparent to people born before 1985 or so.
Matt Trout noticed I had linked to one of his articles, and kindly sent along two more good ones on open source topics: Respect is Per Community and You Aren’t Good Enough (video). The video is something I can certainly get behind: it’s easier to contribute to open source than you think.
Alexander Polakov has ported the ae(4) network driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; it’s committed now. This device is common in some (many?) Asus Eee devices.
The kernel option PCI_MAP_FIXUP has been removed as of July 11th; if you’re upgrading past that point, make sure to remove that option.