- Thanks to Stathis Kamperis, it is now possible to build DragonFly 2.2 on a DragonFly 2.3 system, if for some reason you need to move to a system from before the recent libc changes.
- Matthew Dillon has replaced the existing BSD malloc with a port of the slab allocator, which makes malloc() faster, with minor benefits for a buildworld.
- Matthew Dillon also has a patch for people wanting to look for the elusive ‘file-missing-in-directory-listing’ Hammer bug. Caveat Emptor.
There’s a new @Play column focusing on more of the entries at the Seven Day RogueLike competition. I mention this because roguelikes have been around on Unix-ish systems forever, some of these may work on DragonFly, and because they are much more complex and interesting than I would have thought possible.
Murray Stokely very kindly passed me a link to his summary of the 8 videos now online showing presentations from the recent 2009 DCBSDCon.
Of particular interest is Robert Luciani’s talk about M:N threading in DragonFly. Yes, that’s the same Robert Luciani who is participating in Summer of Code with DragonFly to profile kernel contention on multiprocessor systems.
There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.
Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott
Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon
Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear
Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon
Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper
Bad: having the system used for mirroring DragonFly crash a lot.
Sascha Wildner’s added the cxm(4) driver, which supports Hauppauge PVR-250/350 video capture cards. Hasso Tepper kindly donated the hardware for testing.
I’ll note here that I have a Hauppauge TV card (848 chipset, I think) that’s possibly the oldest continuously functioning computer equipment I own; I’ve been using it for close to a decade without a single problem. I have nothing else that has reached the benchmark.
Student projects for Google Summer of Code will be announced this Monday, for DragonFly, and for all other participating organizations. DragonFly has 5 slots, and more than 5 excellent proposals, which is a good kind of problem to have. We’ll see what we can fit.
Sdävtaker came up with a potential idea for encrypting backup files, and Matthew Dillon followed up with another way that uses Hammer.
Daniel Lorch is working on a port of Hammer to Linux’s VFS, though since he’s using FUSE, it will be able to reach other systems, like NetBSD. The code is accessible.
Peter Avalos imported OpenSSL-0.9.8k. I think. I saw him make room, but the actual commit didn’t come through on the mailing list, so I’m not sure.
In related news, the 1.0 version of OpenSSL appears to be coming up.
Is DragonFly vulnerable to a recently found pf issue? Nope, thank goodness.
There’s a new tool being put together for pkgsrc installation and management, called pkg_dry. There’s an initial version for download with instructions from its creator, Emile “iMil” Heitor. It looks to duplicate the functionality of apt-get or yum, by handling binary-only remote package management.
Someone please test this on DragonFly, though not on a production machine… If it does end up matching apt-get (the only thing I like in Debian) in terms of functionality, that will be fantastic! I have wanted something like this for a while.
Antonio Huete Jimenez reports that DragonFly now can install and run without issue on VirtualBox 2.2.0; it had been unable to work in previous releases.
Matthew Dillon is trying to track down a Hammer bug where directory entries (files, usually) are missed, whether it’s with ls or find or similar. Has this happened to you? It’s apparently very hard to duplicate, so please speak up if it has.
Hasso Tepper reported on the results of Peter Avalos’s major libc changes; someone retiring libc_r would help, as would someone figuring out why unistd.h isn’t found on DragonFly.
Naoya Sugioka has some preliminary patches for kqemu on DragonFly. In testing, he found it made qemu run slower, which is the opposite of its purpose, so he’d appreciate suggestions.
Can someone who uses git more heavily than I do look at Tig, a git viewer, and mention if it is useful? It looks interesting, as one of the features that git ‘lacks’ is a visual client other than at the command line.
BSDTalk has interviewed Dan Langille, a driving force behind the yearly BSDCan event. The convention is coming up on the 8th and 9th of May. (13 minutes)
Two recent pkgsrc changes that won’t directly affect how your packages are installed, but are still worth knowing about:
- Thomas Klausner made some adjustments to license handling for pkgsrc. It’s possible to prevent packages with or without certain licenses from installing, even as a dependency. His post contains details of the by-default accepted licenses.
- Joerg Sonnenberger has removed most instances of NO_CHECKSUM. This will help people with poor network connections, and (I would imagine) will be better for security, too.
My apologies, folks – the site is going up and down, along with my network connection. It’s probably because of Time Warner (my network provider) trying and failing to correctly implement bandwidth measuring tools for their upcoming volume cap. (I keep getting passed a private IP.)