Just to follow up on earlier threads: the first part of the multiprocessor-safe network interrupt code has gone in.
Sergey Glushchenko asked a question about how the LWKT scheduler functions, and Matthew Dillon wrote up a rather detailed answer.
Do you use wireless? Specifically, the iwi, ipw, wi, or ndis drivers? Do you need WPA encryption? You need Andrew Atrens’ large patch.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert plans to commit this patch before the next release if he can get at least one person using one of each of the drivers listed above to test. That means before December 15th, so time’s a-wasting! Andrew Atrens has already been using this patch in production.
BSDCan 2006 is looking for proposals for (technical) papers, for presentation at their next event in May, 2006.
Matthew Dillon’s posted his first patch that can make network interrupts multiprocessor-safe. If you don’t want to run bleeding-edge code, it’s worth reading for the explanation.
‘walt’ wrote up a rather nice description about how debugging works, or at least how it can work.
UnixReview.com has several new articles: “Making a Dashboard Widget for Systems Administration Purposes” (for you Mac/BSD users), “Common Network Protocols“, focusing on Perl, and “John & Ed’s Scripting Screwups“.
Matthew Dillon posted his plans for the next release, which revolve around multiprocessor capability and the inclusion of pkgsrc. He also noted some of what he plans for immediately after the 1.4 release.
There’s been two updates on the DragonFly website: the 1.2 page now lists the changes in version 1.2.6, and the download page now lists the pkgsrc binary mirrors.
Matthew Dillon’s making some changes get get us just a little closer to removing the Big Giant Lock for multiprocessor systems; it’s now possible to treat certain interrupts, traps, and syscalls as mpsafe. mpsafe, for the acronymically challenged, is “multi-processor safe”.
Joerg Sonneberger’s commit makes clear his latest RC system changes make DragonFly more compatible with pkgsrc.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted a warning for those running DragonFly 1.2 systems that plan to move to 1.4: the RC system is changing slightly, removing a keyword issue.
Kamil Chatrnuch has created a DragonFly BSD group on Frappr, a “Friend Mapper” application. Add yourself and your interests, if you are so inclined.
The latest FreeBSD Status Report is up, with reports on a large variety of projects, including the results of a number of Google Summer of Code projects that used FreeBSD.
The pkgsrc guide (not DragonFly-specific; for that, see the wiki) has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese.
Why, yes, I am having a hard time finding newsworthy items today; why do you ask?
If you’re running the latest Development code, you will need to do a full build/install of world and kernel, because of a libc change. Matthew Dillon says so.
This week, UnixReview.com has book reviews of Networks, Security and Complexity and Digital Identity, along with a writeup of some Nagios plug-ins.
Matthew Dillon’s tsleep patches are in, making another chunk of code multiprocessor safe. The commit message comes with a good bit of explanation, too.
It’s labeled 3 but named 4. Either way, read the message to see the details.