The DCBSDCon blog has another speaker announced: Ted Unangst, who will be talking about SMP and OpenBSD.
Holiday distraction: Some not-completely-accurate educational literature about computers. (via)
Pkgsrc is frozen right now for the 2008Q4 release, and should last to the end of the month. I’m working on having a build of it on pkgbox, though it looks like there’s some issues that slipped into the release.
BSDTalk has apparently hit 3 years! An excellent milestone. Oh, and the latest version is an 17-minute interview with Michael Lauth, the iXsystems CEO.
iXsystems is working on a “BSD Laptop“, which is an interesting idea; it was hinted at during one of Will Backman’s live podcasts from NYCBSDCon, I think it was. My first reaction to the idea is to think “Oh, you can just buy any laptop for that”. My second reaction is to look at the 3 laptops in the room with me that can’t quite boot any BSD flavor, and change my mind.
The patch for carp(4) that Sepherosa Ziehau posted a while back has been reworked, please (re)test, if you use carp(4).
The GameSetWatch column Pixel Journeys, by the same fellow who writes the @Play columns I often link to, has a writeup about dnd, an early role-playing game (but kind of a roguelike!) I’ve never heard of on a computer system I’ve never heard of. Just reading about gives me that wierd feeling like the first time I encountered VMS.
In addition to committing the new scheduler improvements mentioned earlier this week, Matthew Dillon has made some changes to how DragonFly handles low memory situations, so the system will be able to recover much more quickly. He’s also asking for testers of his new vm.burst_fault sysctl.
Hasso Tepper added OpenPAM as a vendor branch in DragonFly’s git repository, and wrote up some notes, including the tip for .git/config:
[core] whitespace = -trailing-space, -space-before-tab Which I've already needed.
Papers for USENIX 2009 are due January 9th, which isn’t very far off, what with the holiday season. So get cracking!
Jason Dixon announced that DCBSDCon registration is open now. Also, they’ve announced Kirk McKusick, Henning Brauer, and Chris Buechler as speakers, with more people announced every Monday and Thursday until the Big Event. (That’s a lot of people…)
Does this XKCD comic ring true for anyone else? In my case, it was my last 2 years of undergraduate school, not 11th grade, but still. Blame open source software and its ability to provide a framework for contribution.
Related: The End of Credentials (via)
Are you going to the 25th Chaos Communication Congress, at the end of this year? Let other DragonFly people know, as they’ll be there too.
Hasso Tepper noticed that the scheduler performance on his DragonFly desktop was poor. Interactivity went way down whenever he had multiple intensive processes running, like building software while browsing the web.
Matthew Dillon came up with a patch that seems to have greatly improved responsiveness; there’s even more explanation available.
If you wanted some hacked pkgsrc packages of Mesa and xorg-server, so that you could try out Hasso Tepper’s DRM patch, well, Steve O’Hara-Smith has you covered.
This cartoon from XKCD is very entertaining.
It looks like Jost Tobias Springenberg is planning to revamp DragonFly’s fdisk, which will be much appreciated.
Hasso Tepper has posted his “personal pkgsrc FAQ” – touching on some of the issues around pkgsrc on DragonFly, and pointing out pretty clearly that pkgsrc binary builds need some support, which is partially my fault.
Dmitry Komissaroff has a patch that will get DragonFly booting with ACPI on an Asus Eee 701, though just why hasn’t been figured out yet.
Update: new patch
I’ve finished a bulk build of pkgsrc package binaries for pkgsrc-current and DragonFly 2.0.1, which is on pkgbox now, and should be available on mirrors soon. Hasso Tepper completed a similar and slightly more successful build.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent change to libpcap means that dumps of network traffic taken before this change won’t be readable with libpcap after this change. Unlikely to affect anyone unless you are both dumping a lot of data off the network and updating your system rapidly, but worth mentioning.