If you were looking to create a very large or very small version of the DragonFly logo, I’ve added .eps and .ai versions of the logo to the images page on the DragonFly website.
The iwi(4) firmware has been updated, and there’s an announcement that tells you where to find it.
Happy Cube day!
– 10 Steps to UNIX Nirvana, not all of which may be useful, but it talks about cscope, which I have heard a number of people rave about. (via)
– Dru Lavigne posted more open source alternatives, this time including options for the always-a-problem Visio. (via)
– Producing Open Source Software, which I find interesting, and it’s available in dead tree form and as a free download. This fits with some conversations I’ve had recently.
If you are interested in the Google Summer of Code project, as a student, a mentor, or just want to suggest a project, write that down:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/gsoc2009/
The application period starts for DragonFly (for the organization, not students) in a week, and it’ll help to see who wants to get in on the action.
Daniel Phillips, who is working on the Tux3 filesystem, posted some more design notes. For those who joined recently, Tux3 is a filesystem similar in some ways to Hammer but being designed for Linux as its primary platform. This is a massively complex idea and project, so it’s good to peruse both the Tux3 site and prior posts about it.
I’ll mention this briefly, since it’s off-topic: I’m looking for a new job, and it should come as no surprise that I’d like to work with BSD systems. (resume as PDF)
The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “Geospatial” – something that isn’t covered often in open source terms.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has some tips on how to mirror the git repo for DragonFly more exactly; there’s an additional command that can clean up spurious branches.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added a preference for the emx(4) driver over em(4). This means that loading the emx module or adding the emx device to your kernel config will may turn your em devices into emx. This isn’t dangerous; just a note to keep it from being a surprise.
Edit: Thanks, Sascha Wildner, for pointing out details on which chipsets are affected.
Matthew Dillon notes that a 2.2.1 release will be coming about halfway through March; being a minor release, it’ll be bugfixes for things like the installer and the Hammer undo utility.
Alex Hornung posted a description of the work he’s done so far on a new I/O scheduler, with some details on his ideas on multiple scheduler levels. Feedback is welcomed.
CNet’s Buzz Out Loud podcast #918 mentions the new DragonFly release, though I haven’t yet listened to it to find out how far they get. Also, in the comments. (Thanks, Will Backman)
RUE Beltelecom has a DragonFly mirror; it includes images, snapshots, and binary packages. It’s already listed on the download page on the DragonFly website, too.
Sepherosa Ziehau has updated em(4) to version 6.9.6, with some interesting improvements. It does possible require loading a module now. He also has more patches to test.
Matthias Schmidt readded the CVS DragonFly template. However, git being git, you have to manually bring it down to your local clone of the repo. Do this with:
git config --add commit.template /usr/src/tools/gittemplate
Hammer filesystem, meet Hammer OS. Please don’t take this seriously.
If you can see YouTube, you can see a 20-minute presentation from a Philip Johnson about his experiences from Google Summer of Code 2008, where he was a mentor for another project. If you aren’t familiar with the Summer of Code project, or think that you might participate as a student, this is a good introduction to the concept.
Rob Pike, one of the people responsible for UNIX, among other things, has a photo blog. (via)
Incidentally, his wife’s books are good, and wierd, and I read them long before I had any real idea who Rob Pike was, in a wierd bit of synchronicity. Early computer science history would be a good topic for Jim Ottaviani to publish, come to think of it… (also recommended)
For anyone interested in profiling: I posted details on a bulk build of pkgsrc that seem to imply it’s limited by something other than CPU. The ensuing discussion had some ideas on how to speed up the whole process.
I’ve set up another mirror at df.v12.su, on some equipment/space/bandwidth kindly donated by GP Internet.