BSDCan 2007 has been moved back a week because of a scheduling conflict with the hosting organization, the University of Ottowa.
Sepherosa Ziehau has a slew of new/revised drivers for testing: ural(4), rum(4), re(4), and sk(4). They are, I think, all network drivers. They are not yet committed, so please test if you have the right hardware.
OnLAMP.com has a 3-page interview with various OpenBSD developers about the features in the newest release. The interview goes into interesting detail, and for relevance, some of the newer wireless drivers in DragonFly came from this code work.
Matthew Dillon is making major changes to the namecache over the next 24 hours or so; watch out until it stabilizes. These changes should make nullfs mounting more memory-efficient, among other things, and lays a foundation for union or shadowing filesystems.
Sam Smith is looking for DragonFly developers who live in the UK and would be willing to present to the UKUUG Large Installation System Administration conference next spring.
Matthew Dillon has some comments on ssh, passwords, and security.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has managed to create a patch which, among other aspects of Linux binary support, allows the Linux Flash to work.
Firefox 2.0 has been released. If you’re looking to install it from pkgsrc, Geert Hendrickx is planning to create a separate package in pkgsrc, so that Firefox 1.5 can remain supported. Check www/firefox2 (may not exist yet; used to be wip/firefox2) for the new version.
The news may be slow, but at least it’s in-depth at OnLAMP/BSD. In addition to recently interviewing a disgruntled NetBSD committer, they’ve interviewed Kris Moore from PC-BSD and Matt Olander of iXsystems about their recent company merger/purchase.
Matthew Dillon wrote up a short bit on SMP hardware support, and how it needs to improve. Aso, as part of virtual kernel support, he committed the potential future ability to compile kernels on non-native architectures, i.e. cross-compilation, which can be handy.
Matthew Dillon has reorganized the /usr/src/sys/ topology. Kernel config files will still work as before, though they’ve moved, for different architectures, once those architectures are actually supported. Changes are already in.
Sepherosa Ziehau has improved transmission speed for 802.11x networking under adverse conditions. In other words, faster wireless. See the post for the technical terminology.
Matthew Dillon talked a little bit about serial ports, their uses, and their problems.
The Call for Papers for AsiaBSDCon 2007 is out. There should be some DragonFly developers there, too. Last year’s event was reportedly quite fun. (Thanks, BSDNews)
Matthw Dillon recently outlined the three major steps in his virtual kernel programming; the first step was done. The second now appears to be in progress, if not complete.
This week on UnixReview: a program review of ‘Snort 2.6 and Afterglow‘, a book review of ‘BigNum Math‘, which may be good for causing naps, and ‘Sharing A Linux Scanner On Your Network‘. Don’t let that last title fool you – that’s more about the available-for-BSD SANE.
The binary driver (“blob”) for NVIDIA video cards contained, until recently, a remote root exploit. Maybe those anti-binary people aren’t completely crazy. (Thanks, Undeadly)
I’ve moved to HiddenNetwork for the sidebar ad. HiddenNetwork provides ads for computer jobs, which I’d bet would interest most of the Digest’s readers. Some of them look tempting to me, in fact.
I originally heard of HiddenNetwork from reading The Daily WTF, and then had a followup recommendation (good idea, Simon). Please let me know your opinion by comment or email.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s port of FreeBSD-6’s sound infrastructure (including the HDA driver) is available. See his post for more details. It’s an easy install, requiring a simple patch and kernel or module build.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert suggests two projects available for a taker: updating Radeon DRM support, or updating the linux syscall support, both of which have existing code from which to start.