A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
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:
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.
DragonFly hasn’t worked under VirtualBox for a long time. Several people found a cause, though not the reason for it – yet.
This question at the howling void about donating to open source projects (in this case, DesktopBSD) got me thinking. I’ve been meaning to investigate setting up a DragonFly nonprofit similar to FreeBSD and NetBSD‘s foundation efforts, in order to receive donations and have a legal entity. Anyone have experience with setting up a 501(c)3 company?
Christian Sturm put together a DragonFly mirror stats script; the script connects to and graphs the how reachable each mirror site is. Nifty!
Louisa Luciani, one of the Google Summer of Code students for DragonFly, wants to hear what people want on a LiveCD. Suggestions by email, please, though some discussion ensued anyway.
Nirmal Thacker, another SoC student, asked some questions to prepare for his anticipatory scheduler work, which incidentally led to some good links for comparing or reviewing existing FreeBSD/DragonFly code.
BSDTalk has made it to the semicentennial milestone of 150 podcasts, with number 150 being Alex Feldman from Sangoma.
Everybody welcome our newest DragonFly committer: Michael Neumann.
I’m breaking out the bullet points again:
It’s from back in March, but this Ars Technica article on filesystems does a pretty good job of historical coverage, though it’s doesn’t go very far into the technical specifications.
Kevin L. Kane came up with a patch to allow raw socket access within jails. It’s been committed, and it now means that if you set the sysctl jail.allow_raw_sockets, you can ping when in a jail.
Peter Avalos has gone and updated less, tnftp, libarchive, libedit, and CAM. Thanks, Peter, for all the work!
Matthew Dillon has made another change to HAMMER, which may (he doesn’t say explicitly) require another newfs. After the first HAMMER release, there will be a clear upgrade path for times like these.
Matthew Dillon’s latest report on the state of HAMMER mentions the filesystem’s growing resilience to damage.
William Backman, that lucky guy, is at BSDCan right now. He’s also got a new interview up on BSDTalk with Justin Gibbs of the FreeBSD Foundation.
A recent ACM paper, “A Tale of Four Kernels” compares FreeBSD, Linux, OpenSolaris, and the Windows Research Kernel in terms of code style and structure. The paper itself has a lot of blibber blabber, but it’s interesting to compare the code statistics between the different kernel types. I’d like to see a comparison between different BSD kernels; the gap between the Windows Research Kernel and Linux, for instance, is too great to be able to draw very concrete solutions. (via)