Author: Justin Sherrill

Emiel Kollof is working on the NVIDIA binary video driver; so far it loads correctly, but doesn’t work in X11.

In other discussion about a microkernel, Gary Thorpe noted these historical links about softupdates:

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/tune/5.html#a3
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/misc/#softdeps
http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/index.html
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix99/mckusick.html

And Pedro Guffuni followed up with this:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/smallfiles.html

Joshua Coombs noted he would like to work on a new firewall strategy for DragonFly, and pasted in some of his notes. They are complex enough that it’s better to paste than to sum up. (I sure could use the multiple routes he talks about.)

Pasted material follows:
Continue reading “Firewall Fun”

It looks like the PC Card problems mentioned earlier are really a problem with the DHCP client. David Rhodus is looking for someone to try a new import of the ISC DHCP code. (Updated – an import from FreeBSD-5 is happening instead, since that fixes some problems with the most recent ISC code.)

Galen Sampson found that using NFS without -maproot will cause file truncation; Matt Dillon has a temporary hack that will fix it, which will be committed by the end of the week if it works without trouble.

Matt Dillon disabled background bitmap writes, as it can apparently cause certain race conditions. He notes: “Eventually the problem background bitmap writes solved will be solved more generally by implementing page COWing durign [sic] device I/O to avoid stalls on pages undergoing write I/O.”

There’s a Slashdot article noting that Matt Dillon will be available for a Q&A session. It’s on Thursday, Oct. 9th, 9 PM EDT in SlashNET’s #forum. If you miss it, it should be later available in http://www.slashnet.org/forums/.

Emiel Kollof found that to get a PCMCIA network card going, you need to add these lines to /etc/rc.conf: (replace x’s with your static address, if applicable.)


removable_interfaces="<interface name>"
pccard_ifconfig="inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
or
pccard_ifconfig="DHCP"

John De Boskey posted he had variant symlinks working under FreeBSD 4-Stable, and notes these patches:

http://people.freebsd.org/~jwd/mlinks/freebsd-magic-patches
http://people.freebsd.org/~jwd/mlinks/env-magic-patches

And this post to freebsd-stable.

During a separate thread about microkernels (short summary: it ain’t happening), Pedro Guffuni pointed out Exokernel, a OS project where most everything was in libraries.

Emiel Kollof made a bootsplash screen at 800x600x8, available here. Download, ungzip to /boot, and put these lines in your loader.conf:


vesa_load="YES"
splash_bmp_load="YES"
bitmap_load="YES"
bitmap_name="dfly.bmp"


The screen, incidentally, looks just like the main site logo.

Mike Porter wrote an extended entry about how variant symlinks could handle multiple versions of ports being installed, including a number of special cases like Perl and the modules installed for it.
Continue reading “Variant Symlink explanations”

César Duque posted his own take on how the DragonFly page should look:
http://www.notfound.org/df (it’s a large jpeg.)

Hiten Pandya has apparently been working on a new version of the main site. Those changes are not (yet?) in CVS.

The conversation about how to handle third-party utilities in the base system is continuing. Most everyone is coming around to the idea of variant symlinks – file links that use a variable to determine destination, with that variable value determined by the rc system.

Matt Dillon added to his earlier plan with a description of the framework for this variable data, using a system MTA as an example:
Continue reading “Even more replacement”

David P. Reese, Jr. has completed the 4th stage of his work separating syscalls. This patch splits getsockopt() and setsockopt(). It’s not yet committed as of this writing, but there are no objections yet. A side benefit of this work is that calls like stackgap_init() and stackgap_alloc() can be removed, as they copy data into an area of kernel memory that’s easily overwritten.

The aforementioned K&R -> ANSI cleanups have been committed – that’s about 160 files in bin and sbin that have been cleaned up.

David Rhodus kindly pointed out to me that I missed his commit of ACPI code from Intel, back on the 23rd.

It’s not installed by default. To use it, you’ll need to add ‘device acpica’ to your kernel config file.