Peter Avalos has updated libpcap to 0.9.5 and tcpdump to 3.9.5. I never realized tcpdump was a separate utility.
User ‘Haidut’ wrote up some notes on how he got DragonFly to boot from a USB stick. (Summary: it just worked.)
In an effort to prevent spam messages from showing up in bugs.dragonflybsd.org via the mail gateway, some work is being done on the bugs site. This may cause some bounce messages to show on the bugs@ mailing list.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s been busy, committing a bunch of networking updates and improvements to driver support.
Joerg Sonnenberger announced a virtual pkgsrc hackathon, aimed at closing as many PRs as possible. It’s at the same time as 23c3 – the end of this month. (Don’t forget the DragonFly meetup, there!)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert bought a new laptop, and wants to throttle the speed to reduce heat and power usage. He’s updated some of DragonFly’s est support from NetBSD’s est, the ‘Enhanced Speed Step‘ driver, which does just that. (These patches are not yet in the DragonFly src tree.) If you’re interested, don’t forget estd.
In addition to the recent BSDCan 2007 call for papers (mentioned previously), the USENIX 2007 Technical Conference has issued its call for papers.
Matthew Dillon posted that there was only one symbol left to change for the kernel work. While anyone was able to jump in, Sascha Wildner went and changed all 10,000+ entries himself. Thanks, Sascha!
UnixReview.com has updated again with articles like “Test Your Knowledge of MySQL Topics” and “Reliably Multi-thread Calculations with Erlang“, along with 2 reviews: “Refactoring Databases: Evolutionary Database Design” and “The Man Who Knew Too Much: Alan Turing and the Invention of the Computer“. That last one sounds like a good geek gift.
BSDCan 2007 (note to self: go) is happening May 18-19th in Ottawa, Canada, and the initial call for papers is out.
bugs.dragonflybsd.org has seen a lot more activity lately, with the number of reported issues down by a third, to around 100. If you want to help out, try to replicate an older bug (especially ones from DragonFly 1.4), and mention if it doesn’t seem to be around any more. If you’re a developer, there’s a number of small patches under ‘feature’ that would be easy to check and commit.
Dru Lavigne has a new article up on ONLamp.com/BSD, called “Fun with X.org“. Not all of it applies to DragonFly, but it covers some interesting utilities like xnest, DMX, and xwatchwin.
Alistair Crooks, on the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org mailing list, announced that pkgsrc is being ‘frozen’ for the 2006Q4 branch. That means no major changes for the next 2 weeks, and then a new release of pkgsrc comes out, just in time for the end of the year.
An oft-asked question about pkgsrc is, “How do I upgrade?”. There’s a number of ways to do it, with varying levels of danger and speed. This question has been asked enough times on the pkgsrc-users@ mailing list that Jeremy C. Reed set up a wiki page describing the various tools. Bookmark it, cause someday you’ll want it.
Something that a lot of people could find useful: an extra multiprocessor kernel on the LiveCD. It’s apparently easy to add. (with tweaks) Any takers before January?
file 4.19 has been brought into DragonFly by Peter Avalos.
Vlad Galu posted jemalloc, noting that it performed well when freeing many small objects. (Along the same lines, Thomas E. Spanjaard brought up Google’s tcmalloc, though it’s not complete.) A benchmark showed good results, and Freddie Cash pointed at prior discussion for use in FreeBSD. It’ll take more persuasive numbers to get it in DragonFly, though.
Since the next release is coming up, I’m trying to clean out as many old bugs as possible. About a third of the bugs at bugs.dragonflybsd.org are cleaned out, but some of the remaining ones are older and may no longer apply.
If you’ve ever posted a bug to the bugs@ mailing list, please give bugs.dragonflybsd.org a look and make sure you don’t have any old issues sitting there.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s archive of DragonFly binaries for pkgsrc has been updated. Notably, this includes a DragonFly build of FireFox 2. It’s in the ‘/vulnerable‘ directory, since there’s (eternally) some security issue that qualifies it. ‘pkg_add ftp://path/to/that/firefox2/package‘ will get it installed for you.