A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
There’s some more explanations of how disk serial number support is working from Matthew Dillon, plus a warning that a full kernel/world rebuild is needed because of these changes.
If I’m reading it right, serial number support, combined with a dynamic /dev, makes it possible to identify a disk by serial number, assign a name to it, and then refer to that disk directly by name in places like /etc/fstab. Much, much easier than remembering /dev/ad0c or /dev/ad1a, and so on.
DevFS breaks vinum. Will it be fixed? Yes, hopefully very soon.
Preliminary serial number support for drive identification has been added to DragonFly, with /dev/serno listing the appropriate devices and numbers.
Dru Lavigne needs someone for the BSD booth at the Ohio Linuxfest, in late September. Please help out if you’ll be near; it’s a good way to meet people and a way to spread BSD.
I picked this up from the bsdevents Twitter feed – possibly the most comprehensive list of events out there. It’s surprising how many conventions and speaking events and etc. are out there!
DevFS has been added. There’s some issues, each with a workaround. Please test, as it’s certain that a major change like this will cause new problems around video and sound. Once those are fixed, however, device management will be a lot easier.
I published a retention policy for pkgsrc packages. It works out to “current release and last release” for what will be kept as pkgsrc binaries that you can add with pkg_radd. If you need longer-term support, speak up, but I don’t think this will be a problem for anyone.
Want to bring Hammer to Slackware Linux? People want it, and there’s some work already in progress.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has been working on an import of gcc 4.4 to DragonFly; it’s not usable yet, but when it is, it means the 3.x gcc code can be dropped.
This machine, shiningsilence.com, is having some issues. I had to power down because of unrelated problems, and the system couldn’t find the kernel on the next boot, though the issue disappeared on the next boot. That’s enough of an excuse to build new…
Any hardware recommendations? I’m interested in hearing what chipsets/disks/RAID setups/etc. and/or hardware suppliers worked well for people.
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on open-source businesses. You should read this if you plan to (or have at least dreamed of) being your own boss.
The web pages on www.dragonflybsd.org now show individual page history through gitweb, and the RecentChanges page will link to diffs for each new edit.
(My apologies for not figuring this out sooner.)
Postgres version 8.1 is going to be removed from pkgsrc soon, since Postgres 8.4 is now available (in general, and in pkgsrc). Speak up on the pkgsrc mailing lists if this is a significant problem for you.
A recent change from Matthew Dillon makes it possible for a NFS client connection to be cleanly re-established after a reboot. Previously, the server would lose track of the client.
Thanks to Xin Li, gzip now supports pack and can unpack archives in that format.
Not directly DragonFly-related, but good to think about: the amount of effort you put into reporting bugs often pays off proportionally.
Hug a sysadmin today, please.
The DevFS Summer of Code project is going into DragonFly this weekend; be ready for surprises if you update. It’s not complete yet; there’s a few more weeks for Summer of Code, but there’s other work that this code will enable.
Sepherosa Ziehau working on merging some of Alexander Polakov’s ACPI work; testers needed. If you have a system that pitches a fit with ACPI enabled, you would make a perfect subject.
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.