Peter Avalos has updated libarchive in DragonFly to 2.5.4b. Thanks, Peter!
If you’ve been wanting to really tax the heck out of your filesystem – whether or not it’s HAMMER – here’s a good way to do so.
On a similar tangent, Dimitri Nikulin and Aggelos Economopoulos mentioned several other filesystem projects that may be fun to read about: POHMELFS, Btrfs, and CRFS.
KernelTrap has a summary up of recent HAMMER development, though if you’ve been reading here, it’ll already be familiar in a more truncated format.
Also! There’s a June 13th HAMMER update From Matthew Dillon, just to continue the trend. Recompile and re-newfs, as usual.
Following some of the article tags at KernelTrap creates an interesting topic-specific DragonFly history, incidentally.
BSDTalk has a 12 minute interview with Michael W. Lucas, author of a number of BSD books and the Big Scary Daemons column at OnLAMP. His writing is excellent.
Matthew Dillon’s posted daily updates for the past three days, so I’ll link them all here:
- June 9th: bugs fixed
- June 10th: Another newfs’ing required
- June 11th: Surprisingly good performance numbers
“Building OpenSolaris Communities“, found on an OpenSolaris blog, is a generally excellent guide on how to build an open-source community. It’s based around OpenSolaris, which isn’t a surprise, but almost everything discussed applies equally well to DragonFly or other projects without a corporate source. (via… I lost track, sorry!)
Hasso Tepper recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc on DragonFly 1.13. He’s posted the end result, and it’s looking much better than it did at the last quarterly release: 87% complete, and only 5% of the remaining amount were actual build failures – the rest were dependencies on those failed items.
Aggelos Economopoulos, who is working on making the network stack multiprocessor safe, has a page up on the DragonFly wiki describing his work. Normally I’d link to his recent conversations about this on the kernel@ mailing list, but he’s already done a nice job describing/linking it on the wiki.
Benchmarks would be good. I bring this up because Hubert Feyrer has a post about various NetBSD happenings, which includes some interesting benchmark work. It doesn’t include DragonFly, but it’s a good model from which to work. Notice the hint there? Was it too subtle?
Most of the benchmarking work these days seems to focus on multi-cpu scalability… I would like to just see comparative numbers, especially since there’s still plenty of single-cpu systems around.
Hasso Tepper, who has been submitting many pkgsrc changes lately, noticed a few non-trivial pkgsrc issues. He listed them out as available projects for anyone who wants to help out.
Another linkdump!
- Waxy.org has a complete version of the 5-part series, The Machine That Changed the World. This aired in 1992 and is both an excellent history of computing and also an interesting glimpse of the computing world before the World Wide Web steamrolled into the public eye. Part 1, part 2, part 3, part 4, and part 5 are available. If you don’t have a Flash-enabled browser to watch them, part 5 has a link to a torrent of H.264 MP4 files that contain the same complete broadcase.
- More old school nerditry: Dungeons & Dragons history, plus a rebuttal, all in far more depth than I thought possible. (Via)
- New school (rejectionist) nerditry: Ten ways to make an iPhone killer.
Undeadly.org has an interesting article about sticking to base applications. It’s all about making the programs that come in the base system install work instead of needing to install third-party packages to get a comfortable work environment.
It’s OpenBSD specific, but it is generally applicable to any system with a base set of included tools, which generally means all BSDs. The comments have some interesting parts, too, like using a source control system to synchronize dotfiles across multiple systems. (just having one consistent .vimrc would make me happy)
KernelTrap has a very nice summation of Constantine Murenin’s BSDCan 2008 talk about the OpenBSD sensors framework. This framework is in DragonFly now. It was also in and then out of FreeBSD; the KernelTrap article (in addition to describing how the actual code works) covers some of the conversation between Poul Henning-Kamp and Constantine Murenin at the BSDCan event about why that happened with FreeBSD.
Updated again: description changed, at Constantine’s request.
“FreeBSD – The Unknown Giant” has a nice compilation of BSD videos (and some pictures) from recent conferences.
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.