Matthew Dillon is starting some work that will possibly destabilize HEAD for a bit. The work involves vnode reference counting and locking. The advantage is that it will remove the hard locks that filesystems can experience, such as waiting for NFS mounts to time out.
Who’s our newest committer? Why, it’s Peter Avalos!
pkgsrc.dragonflybsd.org is a new, much-easier-to-remember CNAME for Joerg Sonnenberger’s packages.stura.uni-rostock.de binary pkgsrc package site for DragonFly.
It’s now possible to build the material in doc, including the handbook, using tools from pkgsrc, thanks to work from both me and Victor Balada Diaz. (The doc framework was previously ports-centric.) If you’re curious, the needed packages appear to be netbsd-doc, libxslt, docbook-xsl, ghostscript-gnu, netpbm, and jade, along with tex-jadetex if you want to prodcue it in PDF form.
Karthik Subramanian found his work connection no longer worked for CVSup, due to a new firewall. From further discussion, his remaining options appear to be CVS, rsync, a tarball, and Mercurial.
Hubert Feyrer has a number of interesting links on his blog lately: netbsd.sk has an article on pkgsrc written in Slovakian, two links to explain what capabilities are, and another of the “Look, kids! BSD!” articles that appear every few months.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s Roundup bug tracker is now available at bugs.dragonflybsd.org.
Unixreview.com this week has an article on certification: “Further Examining Changes to the A+ Certification“, book reviews of “How to Break Web Software” and “Programming PHP, Second Edition“, and “Regular Expressions: Simplest possible not always so simple“.
lsof doesn’t build on DragonFly, but apparently the DragonFly version of fstat works well as an alternative, barring the occasional problem.
In a larger conversation about using CF cards in place of normal hard drives, Oliver Fromme mentioned that he’s been building a small computer into the case of a Sony CD player, and has pictures to prove it. (and yes, it could run DragonFly.)
The utility calendar can be used to provide reminders of upcoming events; you can even provide your own personalized list, as Sascha Wildner pointed out.
(If you’re interested in a columnar calendar, similar to a wall calendar, try cal.)
A tip found from a larger discussion of root shells: su -m allows the user’s shell to be brought forth as the root shell. If you have multiple people su’ing to root, this will allow each to use a favorite shell instead of the default /bin/tcsh.
Matthew Dillon posted two tidbits of information: ‘large mode‘ in BIOS can be needed to make disks visible, and why console messages are often limited in rate.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch that updates the em(4) driver (that’s a network chipset, if it’s unfamiliar) to the latest version from Intel’s website. Give it a try if you’ve got the hardware. It’ll be in the tree in two weeks.
bfconfig has been removed, as ifconfig now contains all of brconfig’s features.
Producing a trace from kdgb can be difficult, especially if the crash involved kernel modules whose symbols are not necessarily visible. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has directions on how to resolve this.
Matthew Dillon has removed the thread pointer argument from all device operations. What does this mean? Glad you asked.