I haven’t had any posts for the past day or so because there’s not been a lot of activity on the mailing lists, and I’m working up an ‘end-of-year’ report similar to the FreeBSD Status Reports. No link yet, cause it’s not done.
Dillon diary done up
Matt Dillon’s updated his diary.
nrelease directory
/usr/src/nrelease has the ability to build the new ‘live’ CD iso images. Listed here is what Matt Dillon listed as possible make targets in that directory:
“release: This will do a full buildworld and buildkernel (GENERIC)
with the current source tree, then generate the release
ISO and directory structure in /usr/release.quickrel: This will do a ‘quick’ buildworld and buildkernel (i.e.
-DNOCLEAN) and then generate the release ISO and directory
structure in /usr/release.realquickrel: This is even faster. It assumes that the buildkernel and
buildworld have already been done and just generates the ISO
directory structure and ISO file in /usr/release.”
‘live CD’ available
Matt Dillon has created ‘live CD’ features, so you can boot from a DragonFly CD and get to a useable prompt. To support this, cpdup is now included in /bin, and mount_mfs now has the -C option, which will automatically copy a read-only filesystem into a MFS mount. An experimental ISO is available on the download page.
Be warned that you will have to lay out filesystems on your own with fdisk, disklabel, etc., and this is largely undocumented, except in the README.
Continue reading “‘live CD’ available”
BIND better
David Rhodus has checked in a new version of BIND, which may correct the recently discovered possible DoS. (commit notes don’t specify.)
Timing
So, it looks like this:
From an offhand comment Matt Dillon made, the first ‘release’ of Dragonfly is planned at least several months from now. (No definite date yet.) FreeBSD-5 should be entering a stable branch (5.3) around the same time, and the stable 2.6 Linux kernel should be appearing around mid-December, close to the same time as FreeBSD 5.2. KDE 3.2 should also be out in February. Gnome 2.6 is due in March.
So, early 2004 looks like it will have much to play with.
ekkoBSD link
Not much to report, in part because of the U.S. holiday, so here’s a link to a recently-announced OpenBSD variant: ekkoBSD.
BSD Party pictures
Matt Dillon has pictures posted from the BSD Party.
Misc. Code
libcaps in
Matt Dillon has added in a new ‘libcaps’ library, mostly for experimentation, which appears to be the base for userland threading.
Post quoted:
Continue reading “libcaps in”
No new groups … yet
Probably in part because of a long-running off-topic SCO thread in dragonfly.kernel, ‘trent’ suggested an advocacy or general group. Matt Dillon said “in a few months, just prior to the first release”.
k5admin -> kadmin
Emiel Kollof plans to change the Heimdal utilities to a format more similar to other platforms, unless someone else wants it.
No contrib changes
In a conversation about updating bind, several people noted that changes other than vendor updates to contrib can wait until there’s a complete packaging system in place. (i.e. things like bind and sendmail are staying in place, for now.)
Start cleanly
There’s been a number of people reporting various breakages during install or boot time. To weed out problems caused by old data right away, remember to:
rm -rf /usr/obj
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
Upcall mechanism in
Matt Dillon added an “upcall mechanism to support userland LWKT”. You can look at the man page for upc_register in source.
Another microkernel project
In a followup to the K42 post, Max Laier pointed at the L4Ka project, which is somewhat similar in scope.
An interesting confluence
Michal Ostrowski, a developer with the K42 project at IBM Research, posted to dragonfly.kernel and noted that DragonFly and K42 are very similar in design and could benefit from interaction. He brought up several papers located on their site: a K42 overview, K42 and traditional UNIX APIs, and K42’s threading and scheduling infrastructure. The closely-related Tornado operating system also has some good information.
I’ve been playing too much Day of Defeat; I see ‘KAR98‘ every time I read K42. The project’s not about a teutonic WW2 rifle, though – the name K42 has a different origin.
SCO hints at widening suit
Jeroen Ruigrok pointed out this Newsforge article that says SCO will probably be bringing the AT&T settlement over BSD into court. According to people’s opinions, however, this is a last legal flailing, rather than anything that will significantly affect BSD-derived systems like DragonFly.
Daemonnews also has a mention of this, where Marc Rassbach points out the article’s author has a ‘poison pen’ history vs. BSD products, and Peter Hansteen notes a Forbes article on SCO, this Byte article, and the ever-bearded Greg Lehey’s excellent appraisal of this mess.
Improved installation writeup
I’ve corrected my how-to-install writeup, based on what several people said in dragonfly.kernel. Several steps are now removed, but it still has the same flavor.
Release styles
According to Matt Dillon, DragonFly will skip the multiple branch style of FreeBSD (STABLE, CURRENT branches) and tag the single main branch, slipping as needed for security fixes.