Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert posted these steps for trying out gcc 4.0, which is in DragonFly but not yet part of the build process.
There’s 28 BSD projects in Google’s Summer of Code project. The 8 NetBSD-sponsored projects are already listed. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer.)
The street where shiningsilence.com is hosted (my house) has been having electrical outages over the course of today; they’re lasting longer than my UPS can handle, so access may be intermittent if the power goes out again.
Chris Coleman has BSDUpdates.com, with free binary security upgrades for FreeBSD 5.3. There’s a good description on BSDNews about the service, though it doesn’t cover how it works in-depth. “BSDUpdates” suggests that this may be extended to the other BSDs at some point; it’d sure be handy for DragonFly once the development pace slows.
Sendmail 8.13.4 is in DragonFly, though I don’t know if it’s hooked into the build yet.
It’s a little late to mention this, because it’s either complete or close to complete, but Matthew Dillon and others have been removing SPL sections in code (there were more than 500 locations) and replacing them with critical sections. This is an important step on the road to Giant Lock-free SMP.
Joerg Sonnenberger is working on pkgsrc for DragonFly, as are a number of other developers; you can obtain his latest changes at: (Caveat emptor!)
Remember TIMER_USE_1? It’s still available as hw.i8254.walltimer=1 if you need it. If you are unsure, you’re probably fine.
However, DragonFly will be using the ACPI timer, so it will be a moot point.
The Libre Software Meeting is taking place in Dijon, France, July 5th to July 9th. DragonFly is not specifically referenced there, but it’s for open source in general.
The same set of questions about Linux vs. BSD was asked of several people: Linus Torvalds (Linux), Theo De Raadt (OpenBSD) and Christos Zoulas (NetBSD), and Matthew Dillon (DragonFly BSD). (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer)
I have a semi-functional electrical system and a partial network up, so regular newsposts should resume. Sorry about the extended hiatus – it wasn’t supposed to take this long!
David Rhodus posted on gobsd.com about the new mbuf allocation scheme. I don’t have any benchmarks to quantify the difference, unfortunately.
Google is running a project called “Summer of Code” where students on summer break can write open-source code and get paid for it. Applications are closed at this point. FreeBSD and NetBSD are participating, along with a host of other excellent organizations. Hubert Feyrer’s blog has some details on the process so far.
DragonFly isn’t participating directly, but if you were itching for something to do, there’s projects available.
Matthew Dillon changed the way network card polling works; follow the thread for much discussion on implementation. This happened back at the end of May.
I’ll play catchup on all the interesting UNIXReview articles that have gone by:
– Cleaning Up Large Mailing Lists: Removing Bad Addresses (a perennial issue)
– Shell Corner: DVD-RAM Daily Backup (handy!)
– Book reviews:
Mapping Security : The Corporate Security Sourcebook for Today’s Global Economy
Classic Shell Scripting (A tortoise on the cover – good symbolism)
Network Security
Buffer Overflow Attacks: Detect, Exploit, Prevent
I’m all moved, or at least I have all my possessions boxed up in one house. I’ve got a partial network going, so I will attempt to get caught up on all the DragonFly news that happened recently, though it will take a few days.
I have additional electrical work that needs to be done in my house, so shiningsilence.com may have the occasional outage in the next week or two – I don’t anticipate it being for more than a few hours at a time, however.
shiningsilence.com is moving tomorrow from one physical location to a new one – it’s just a few miles, but it means an outage. The domain will probably go down tonight when I package up hardware, and should hopefully return over the next few days as my new link is installed and DNS updates.
Joerg Sonnenberger has updated GCC to GCC 3.4.4. Also, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert reports his experimental DragonFly system built entirely with GCC 4.0 is working well.
I missed this recently: OpenBSD 3.7 is out, and ONLamp.com/BSD has an interview with some of the developers.