A post by Ivan Voras on kernel@ led to a useful discussion talking about tokens contrasted with mutexes.
Hubert Feyrer‘s blog mentioned the 2004 Report of the NetBSD Foundation, which mentions the new DragonFly support in pkgsrc, thanks to Todd Willey. It also links to some interesting performance followups and the new NetBSD store, among other things.
If you have a development account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org, please make sure it’s cleaned of files you don’t need – /home is getting full from all the people on there.
The recent libc changes broke ssh, but it’s fixed already. Update and recompile libc to make it work again. Note that if you are following DragonFly_Stable, you won’t have had any of this trouble.
Josua Coombs tried out pkgsrc, and found it mostly working.
Also, pkgsrc on DragonFly now builds X.org. There will be a new pkgsrc-using build of DragonFly on gobsd.org soon.
While talking about jails, Matthew Dillon brought up the idea that a user-level virtual DragonFly system, sorta like UML, is possible.
Liam J. Foy’s added a new battd daemon, for battery monitoring. He’s looking for feedback.
There’s been some big changes to libc, which ought not to hurt anything in the most current code, but watch out. (Commit message.)
David Xu is our newest committer, and has added in his 1:1 threading library, though with some caveats.
If you have 10 minutes to waste, there’s a “Which BSD should I use” post over on Slashdot/BSD.
Andre Nathan posted a link to an interview of Matthew Dillon over at BSDNexus.com, with some good information on where DragonFly is headed in the short term.
The DragonFly mirror at bsdtech.com is down due to an employment change. (Good luck, Erik Skaalerud!) There’s a new source mirror in Riga, Latvia, located at http://alxl.info/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/?cvsroot=DragonFly. Also, the new mirror at vt220.com now has HTTP access.
Maxime Labelle has a new DragonFly mirror up in Quebec, Canada, at ftp://bsd.vt220.com/.
“Ed” found that Qt 3.3.4 now explicitly supports DragonFly.
KernelTrap has an interview of Timothy Miller, who is behind the Open Graphics Project, with the admirable goal of creating a video card that works well in 2D and 3D on open source platforms. Well, Linux, mostly, but my hope springs eternal for 4+ multihead 3D displays. Engineering samples are/will be available for anyone who wants to work on a DragonFly-specific driver. (thanks, BSDNews.)
Opensolaris.org is up, where Sun is releasing a large quantity of code for Solaris. Neat! Solaris is based off of BSD4.1, if you look back far enough. Way, way far. (Thanks Slashdot.)
FreeBSD 4.11 has been released. This is probably the last release in the 4.x series, though it will be updated for some time yet with needed security fixes. The next DragonFly release is slated for before the USENIX Technical Conference in April, so there’s an upgrade path available…
UnixReview.com has three new articles up: one on using the man page editor ManEdit, one on the security tool Samhain, and a review of the No Starch Press book “Write Great Code — Understanding the Machine“. Incidentally, the No Starch Press book Absolute BSD (covering FreeBSD, by excellent writer Michael Lucas of Big Scary Daemons fame) is a rare thing: a book about an operating system that’s fun to read.
Guillermo Garcia Rojas has created Spanish translations of Installing DragonFly and Laptop Installation.
There’s now a Lithuanian translation of the DragonFly FAQ, on the wiki. There’s also a Polish translation out there, too, that I managed to previously miss.