The latest interview on BSDTalk is an interview with Anders “Ragge” Magnusson about his work on pcc. Looking at the mailing lists, there is apparently a new website being put together.
Here’s some lazy reading for a Friday: “The Digital Revolution“, a history of digital technology, which not surprisingly is mostly about computer history. There’s some interesting mentions of World War 2-era computer technology there. (via)
There’s a buffer overflow in OpenSSL that was (re)found recently; there’s a patch available, and it looks like we need it.
BSDTalk 130 is out, with a conversation between Michael Dexter and Marko Zec at EuroBSDCon 2007.
It’s apparently possible to listen to this by phone: +1 (360) 227-6093. I have no idea what the charges are…
The Lost Format Preservation Society documents the different data storage formats that have existed in recent times. Scroll to the right, as they cover a lot. Depending on your age, you will be surprised by the number of analog recording formats that have vanished in the past 10 years. (via)
Jeremy C. Reed, who has contributed to DragonFly, has a new book out: ”
BIND 9 DNS Administration Reference Book“, which collects the ISC documentation on BIND. He has a number of other publications both in print and upcoming. (via)
There’s been a number of code additions worth noting that I’ll place here in bullet form:
- Hasso Tepper has committed the sensor framework to DragonFly, coming from OpenBSD via FreeBSD. He’s also added the coretemp and lm/it drivers.
- Sascha Wildner has updated timezone info, which apparently changes much more often, and more bizarrely, than I’d expect.
- There’s a UUID now for Matthew Dillon’s upcoming HAMMER file system.
Joerg Sonnenberger pointed me at a recent post on the NetBSD tech-kern@ mailing list: Andrew Doran did some comparisons of MySQL’s sysbench on a multi-CPU system, with different operating systems. It unfortunately doesn’t include DragonFly, as DragonFly apparently would not boot on that system, but I’m a sucker for graphs.
It also shows generally better performance for NetBSD recently than for a Linux 2.6 kernel. This is interesting in part because MySQL performance on BSD has historically been worse than on Linux.
OnLAMP has another of its rare BSD articles up; this time on installing Subversion on BSD, with all the ‘bells and whistles”.
Spotted by Hasso Tepper: The Software Freedom Law Center has a new article up titled “Maintaining Permissive-Licensed Files in a GPL-Licensed Project: Guidelines for Developers“, which is another way of saying “How to treat BSD-style licenses right”.
Hasso Tepper wants to get rid of the pcidevs and usbdevs files, as the effort of maintaining them appears to outweigh the benefits. So far, most people agree.
KernelTrap now has web archives of the mailing lists for DragonFly, along with a number of other projects. The interface looks nice, and allows you to track by author, too.
Hasso Tepper has taken the OpenBSD sensors framework, as ported to FreeBSD by a Summer of Code project, and converted it for DragonFly along with a number of drivers.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive and also calendar. Thanks, Peter.
Seen via Gizmodo and other places: 1 gigabyte of storage, then and now.
Hubert Feyrer has done a very nice job of collating all the online material from the various presentations, with data from Axel Gruner, that happened at EuroBSDCon 2007.
I recently completed a bulk build of pkgsrc using Joerg Sonnenberger’s pbulk tool; there has been discussion of using these packages as part of a mirroring system (poke around the thread for more.)
OpenBSD Journal has an interesting article up that talks about the life cycle of a bug, as seen by an OpenBSD user. I call it interesting because it gives a good summary of a bug-squishing process from a ‘user’ perspective.
The freeze period (where only bugfixes are committed) for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc starts tomorrow. Interestingly, this next quarter’s release marks 10 years of pkgsrc.