Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has fixed a recently-discovered BIND security problem.
Rahul Siddharthan asked why BSD shutdowns happen so much faster than with Linux. Out of a number of responses, Oliver Fromme seems to have the most complete writeups.
While on the topic, I posted a note about Apple’s replacement for rc/init/inetd: launchd. It has been partially ported to FreeBSD, though it’s not in the base system.
Delete files that start with – by preceding the filename with two dashes. Someday, you’ll thank me and the 5 people that answered this question on users@.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has imported OpenSSL 0.9.8c, which fixes a recent security issue.
Matthew Dillon, in his effort to create virtual kernels, is renaming the kernel functions malloc(), free(), and realloc(). (They’ll be prefixed with a ‘k’.) The procedure’s happening already.
Julio M. Merino Vidal is working on improving GNOME support in NetBSD and pkgsrc; this has some side benefit for DragonFly, since we use pkgsrc too.
Seen today on Slashdot: A longtime Debian developer is leaving the project, saying, among other things, that a more direct leadership structure, similar to Ubuntu, would prove more effective. Compare that to Charles Hannum’s “NetBSD is stagnating” message, where he also says a stronger leader for NetBSD would help.
This idea matches up with one of my favorite books: The Mythical Man-Month, where Frederick Brooks mentions that a software project should be led by an experienced worker, rather than by committee. It is also similar to the Linux kernel development model (though there’s plenty of other factors that affect it) and other things, like Perl’s pumpking.
On the other hand, there seems to be a cycle where a particular Linux distribution becomes ‘cool’ for about a year or two – Debian, or maybe Slackware, then Red Hat, then SuSe, then Mandrake, then Knoppix, and now Ubuntu. Yes, it’s an inexact timeline.
Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about how to deal with clustering. Instead of partitioning out memory, disk, or CPU resources across the network, it’s possible to create virtual kernels that can then be broken out as individual units for local or remote tasks. (Much easier from a local security and debugging point of view.) He’s followed up with some comments on anticipated speed and relationship to a similar model of User Mode Linux (“UML”).
The bonus: this feature may be available by the time of our next release.
Update: More on security, translating between real and virtual kernels, and how it’ll significantly speed development. That last link can also be taken as a fine example of impatience.
Bill Hacker, the DragonFly mailing lists’ resident Old Person, wrote up his experiences in antediluvian times with computers that did clustering in hardware, similar to what the DragonFly project is trying to do in software.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added hostapd(8) support, plus nVidia MCP61/65 GigE support to the if_nfe driver, from FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
Chris Pressey wrote a detailed list of the changes he is planning for the next version of the BSD Installer. It was on the BSD Installer mailing list, which has no web archives that I know of, so the body of the message is pasted here:
Jr Aquino handed in a new dragonfly photo to the project.
Matthew Dillon posted some of his thoughts on how DragonFly’s clustering support (when ready) will help the average user.
Sepherosa Ziehau has created a framework for controlling transmission rates, for wireless.
Charles M. Hannum, one of the originators of the NetBSD project, posted what I’ll call a rant about the state of NetBSD; he wants NetBSD to lead system development and he blames the organizational layout for slowing development.
It appears he wants to return to the less complex organization of the early days of NetBSD; I don’t think that’s relevant in this stage of NetBSD’s development.  (Is NetBSD the oldest existing open source operating system project?)
It’s a sparse week on UnixReview.com, this week: 2 book reviews, one of “C++ Standard Library Extensions” and the other of “Linux Phrasebook“.
A recent users@ conversation about using UTF-8 and other character encodings has some interesting tidbits.
Joerg Sonnenberger regularly builds binary packages for pkgsrc, for DragonFly, in parallel. This eats up a lot of disk and RAM.
He could use another 2 Gb of DDR2 RAM. This would greatly speed up builds. Got spare RAM or cash? Please help, (he’s at joerg@britannica.bec.de) as this benefits every DragonFly user. (And to a lesser extent, every pkgsrc user.)
Jeremy C. Reed has put together a new book on the pf packet filter, originally from OpenBSD but now found in all the BSDs, including DragonFly. It’s available from his website.