Hubert Feyrer posted links to a BSDCan 2006 talk on BSD Live CDs, a subject near and dear to my heart. (I’d like to see a DragonFly Live CD that included X and a variety of applications, like PC-BSD or Desktop BSD.)
BSD memory management systems are legendary for handling stress well; however, there’s a limit on how much paging can happen and still have a responsive system. Matthew Dillon has put in a possible improvment for low-memory solutions.
Sepherosa Ziehau has his version of the rtw(4) driver available for testing. This is taken fromt he NetBSD driver, and is used in newer wireless cards.
Matthew Dillon has found that an extended form of spinlock is useful for the MP goals he has to do before continuing his VFS work.
Matthew Dillon has removed support for ibcs2 and svr4 emulation. It hasn’t been touched in 10 years… Are there even binaries that still require that anymore?
Matthew Dillon has revamped the system include files in DragonFly, so now including the correct files is much simpler.
There were a number of interesting commits today: Sepherosa Ziehau’s new 802.11 framework, taken in part from FreeBSD 6, is now committed, and he’s also updated the man pages to match. (minor yet very important!) His ath(4) driver will be following soon. Also, Matthew Dillon has moved the LWKT from a token system to spinlocks – see the commit message for details. Finally, there are some side benefits for DragonFly from the Coverity scan of FreeBSD.
Matthew Dillon found some problems in his ongoing vnode work. Apparently, the way to solve them is to make other portions of the code multiprocessor safe.
This week, on UnixReview.com: the book reviews of “Extrusion Detection: Security Monitoring for Internal Intrusions” and “Linux Patch Management“, and more on security certification.
If you’re concerned about (or involved in) device documentation, there’s a new wiki site called Vendor Watch, which lists the state of efforts to get different hardware vendors to document their hardware in a way that makes it usable for open source efforts.
BSDCertification.org has a new logo and a new competition where the best fundraising idea from a user group gets a prize (passes to BSDCan 2007). June 10th is the cutoff for registering your group. (thanks, BSDNews)
I missed this before: BSDTalk has an interview with Scott Ullrich, who has worked on DragonFly and the BSD Installer, among other things. There’s lots of other recent interviews, too.
Joerg Sonnenberger presented at PkgSrcCon 2006 about his experiences bringing pkgsrc to DragonFly. The slides from his presentation are available now, along with all the others.
wiki.dragonflybsd.org is down, along with gobsd.com. The wiki was on a separate server from the rest of dragonflybsd.org, so the rest of the domain is fine, but there’s currently no details on when the wiki will be running again, as the hosting company has apparently taken the server offline.
Because of recent changes to the Java licensing scheme, it’s now possible to include Java as part of a packaging system. It’s available now for pkgsrc, for some versions of NetBSD. Other pkgsrc platforms (like DragonFly) will probably follow suit.
Matthew Dillon’s starting/continuing work on that aforementioned clustering by breaking out the journaling protocols into a module he’s calling “SYSLINK“.
Matthew Dillon, while following up on comments on his recent clustering post, managed to summarize the whole thing in much less space.
Matthew Dillon’s decided to use the journaling work that was done previously on DragonFly to handle communication between the kernel and a VFS, and also between machines in a cluster. He typed up a very detailed explanation that shows where a lot of the groundwork has been done. (Plus, a followup.)
This week on UnixReview.com: Reviews of Unix in a Nutshell, C in a Nutshell, SQL in a Nutshell, and a description of the LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld Conference.