Matthew Dillon, while looking at a locking problem on chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de, happened to explain a bit about SPECFS and the trouble it causes.
Jeffrey Hsu has committed his new spinlock implementation – the commit message has a short explanation of how it was implemented.
I’ve upgraded the software behind this site; it should make no real difference to you, the reader. Please tell me if you encounter something that’s broken.
A big welcome to our two newest DragonFly committers: Sepherosa Ziehau and Noritoshi Demizu. Yep, those are names I’ll have to cut and paste.
Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai has upgraded texinfo to version 4.8.
Matthew Dillon posted that the last (major) ABI changes are done, and Preview has been updated. If you’re running Preview, now is a good time to update. However, you’ll have to rebuild everything, as he describes.
Joerg Anslik has written a very complete bit of documentation on getting a Quake 3 Arena server running under DragonFly; it’s available on the Wiki.
Matthew Dillon posted a warning that the final ABI changes would go in this weekend, and that Preview would soon be bumped to match the bleeding-edge HEAD. That means everything on non-Release systems will have to be rebuilt – pkgsrc/port packages, too.
Jeremy C. Reed has started a bulk build of pkgsrc packages for DragonFly; so far, he has 907 built of 5,523. He’ll have a full report when it completes.
Matthew Dillon explained why his journaling system will be more like a transactional database. (He should know; he wrote one)
UnixReview.com has a review of “Mac OS X Tiger for Unix Geeks“, an article about regular expressions titled “Don’t Fear Reliability“, and a review of the podcasting application jPodder, which may work on DragonFly
Matthew Dillon described some of the possibilities and hurdles for his journaling code.
Jeremy C. Reed announced a new roadmap (.pdf) for the planned BSD certification process at BSDCertification.org.
Chris Pressey found out the hard way that installing DragonFly and then FreeBSD can lead to DragonFly being wiped out by the FreeBSD installer.
Matthew Dillon committed the remaining large portion of kernel work for journaling; he followed up with some comments on remaining userland work.
Do you have an ARECA based RAID/SATA card? Hiten Pandya needs guinea pigs
Joseph Garcia proposed a new format to ifconfig.
There’s several new programs to try out. First, “walt” mentioned his ‘rlc’ program, which can be used to randomize background colors in new xterms. Joerg Anslik ported over the recently released Quake 3 Arena server, and Jeremy C. Reed posted (untested) patches for postgresql 8 in pkgsrc,
Todd Willey posted a fix for compiling gdm in pkgsrc. gdm is necessary for using Gnome.