A recent commit from Matthew Dillon improves HAMMER’s write performance, but introduces some potential stability problems. They should be solved in the next few days.
In my ongoing effort to stray farther off the beaten path than other nerdblogs, I bring you a link to this post at the Nonist: Objectified Circuitry. Think of it this way: the computer you are sitting at right now has probably at least a million of each circuit type pictured in that article.
These parodies of the “Vista Capable” stickers contain, among other systems, DragonFly BSD.
For some end-of-the-work-week reading: Aggelos Economopoulos posted some of his thoughts on in_pcbs for his planned work on removing the Big Giant Lock from networking.
GameSetPlay has another @Play column, with comparisons of roguelike games to Dungeons and Dragons. If you find this interesting, you may be an old-school geek. Like me.
This week’s BSDTalk has an nearly half-hour interview, from BSDCan 2008, with 7 different members of the FreeBSD Core Team.
I think I already read about this, but it didn’t really sink in until I read this commit message: HAMMER will allow multiple physical devices to be mounted as a single volume. Wait! That’s in the wrong tense: it’s possible now.
The new ‘undo’ utility looks equally interesting, though the name may not stay.
Max Lindner posted a summary of his SoC plans for enhancing dma this summer, and he’s looking for feedback.
Louisa Luciani is looking for more discussion on her LiveDVD project; specifically, what kind of environment to create. She’s already collated previous suggestions on the wiki.
Robert Luciani (yes, they’re related) recently finished a school project evaluating threading on DragonFly; his poster and paper (PDF) are available. Appropriately,he’s working on multiprocessing support.
(typos fixed – thanks, smtms on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Among other HAMMER work, Matthew Dillon has added a “softprune” option. With this option, historical versions of a HAMMER filesystem can be tracked by maintaining a list of soft links. There’s some sort of joke about ‘regularity’ to make here.
Matthew Dillon’s new statvfs() calls in the kernel require a full build/install process for world and kernel, if you are running bleeding edge code.
James Frazer sent along a new site design for dragonflybsd.org; I’ve got an example of it hosted locally. Mailing list discussion starts here, and of course comments are welcome.
NASPRO, a sound processing framework, recently had a 0.1.0 release – it works ‘out of the box’ on DragonFly.
BSDTalk 151 has Sean Cody of Frantic Films, a visual effects studio spread over the North American continent, who details his use of BSD at home and at the office. They apparently sling about a huge amount of data.
Michael Neumann has volunteered himself for adding USB4BSD into DragonFly after the 2.0 release. (That release is slated for mid-July, by the way.)
Vkernels on leaf.dragonflybsd.org are now able to locally network; if you are a Google Summer of Code student that needs that functionality, tell Matthew Dillon and he will put you in the right group.
In addition, he’s created a new tool called vknetd, which enables network creation in userland. This is intended for userland applications like vkernels, though there seems to be some capability for a SSH-based VPN? Someone correct me – or better yet, try it out.
I have a number of small things, mostly old-school games, to post, so I’ll break out the bullets:
- Temple of the Roguelike has some links to roguelike applets; they need Java.
- Rob Beschizza asks on Boing Boing Gadgets, “Who’d like a portable text game console?” Me? Of course, running a BSD on a handheld (NetBSD is the most obvious choice) will get you that free.
- Parchment, a z-machine implemented in Javascript. You can play many free text games or dig up Infocom games. (via)
- Everyone has Big Kernel Lock troubles – everyone!
- The howling void has a post on “Smartphones for text SSH use” – an interesting idea, and there are some good suggestions interspersed with the bickering in the comments.
- Hubert Feyrer found an interesting thing: DracoPKG – a combination of pkgsrc and Slackware’s pkgtools.
There’s a bounty for fixing up the Linuxulator; bringing it up to match FreeBSD-current’s state will net you €250. If you want to contribute to the bounty, write your sum into the page. If you want to do the update, volunteer. (There’s already one interested person.)
A recent commit by Michael Neumann makes qemu work, and also the “HP Compaq” (They’re using both names now?) laptop model 6710b. This apparently was a USB issue.
As Dru Lavigne reports, the May issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, focusing on “Enterprise Readness”. I found the article on the need for project management in open source very interesting.