uname -a will now use the CVS tag from the cvsup of code involved in building that kernel. In more explicit terms, DragonFly_Stable will now be reported as such, instead of CURRENT.
Matthew Dillon’s idea about installing a kernel with debug symbols made it to the FreeBSD-current mailing list; much discussion ensued.
Ever wonder how to save those crash dumps, especially if your /var is teeny-tiny? Wonder no more.
Matthew Dillon noted that including a debug kernel by default may make bug reports much easier, at the expense of a relatively small quantity of disk space. After some discussion, it was generally decided to be good enough to implement. (Strangely, it saves disk space, overall.)
Scott Ullrich mentioned that the BSD Installer with FreeBSD 5 is now available. Haters of sysinstall, rejoice!
Update: the FreeSBIE Project is now using it too.
I’ve been changing jobs; I’ll do my best to catch up on news.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert came up with a nice description of how to install DragonFly using tftp and nfs. Matthew Dillon found a way to get that almost automatic, with some dhcpd.conf changes.
The aforementioned spamblocks are now on the DragonFly mailing lists, except for bugs@.
Atte Peltomaki reports that F-Secure SSH builds and runs on DragonFly just fine.
Matthew Dillon posted about some changes to the way the mailing lists work; this is to avoid the ever-increasing spam that has been coming in. The short summary is that is you post through news, or use your subscribing address when posting mail, it should work normally. Otherwise, read his plan further.
If you have an existing DragonFly system, and want to use rm -I, it’s explained here.
Matthew Dillon changed the download page to note that dfly-stable-20041009.iso.gz is the best recent release to start with.
Matthew Dillon wrote a little more about how the VFS work is set up, and he posted a patch with his first day of work on the issue. (11,000 lines of code!) Don’t try it unless you feel really lucky.
Matthew Dillon has added (partial) support for devices such as the Logitech Desktop Pro, as suggested by Roland Hammerle from what he found in a FreeBSD patch.
Matthew Dillon has seen some problems on his test machines for DragonFly_Stable, so he’s pushing the tag back to the Sept. 13th point, for reasons he detailed in a separate message. Make sure to be using this if you have a production machine.
Joerg Anslik pointed out that dreamsticker.de now has specific DragonFly case badges available. No image needed, no minimum order, and shipping outside of Germany is possible.
The DragonFly_Stable tag has been slipped up to correct a memory leak and incorporate the ‘rm -I’ fix. This does place the stble code right smack in the middle of the VFS changes, but those appear to be at a stable point right now.
Giorgos Keramidas, after reading an article about how rm -rf / (i.e. accidentally deleting your operating system) is avoided by Sun, suggested on the hackers@freebsd.org mailing list some changes to protect from that. An extensive discussion (bikeshed) ensued. See “Protection from the dreaded “rm -fr /” thread on the former link, if you are curious. It’s still not resolved.
On the other hand, this has been quickly fixed in DragonFly, without changing the basic function of rm. New installs will have this safer behavior by default, though the old unsafe setup can be restored if desired.
In a recent post to kernel about adding devices, Matthew Dillon describes how and why device adding on DragonFly deviated from FreeBSD-4, and how it could (eventually) lead to a different sort of devfs.
The Installer is spreading – look at livebsd.com. Specifically, the 5th item down mentions using the Installer with FreeBSD 5.3b7.