A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
BSD Magazine’s September issue is out. This time, I have an article in it about data recovery with Hammer:
We’ve all experienced instant regret. That’s the feeling that comes within a second of executing a command like “rm -rf * .txt” (note the space) or of cutting the wrong cluster of wires at the end of a long conduit. Not that I am quoting from experience, or anything like that, no…
Sascha Wildner has updated ndis(4), the wrapper that makes Windows network drivers usable on DragonFly, with an extensive description of what’s changed.
Sascha Wildner updated time zone files again. It’s a regular thing, but I wanted to draw attention to this little change:
Samoa moves from east to west of the international date line (changes from UTC-11 to UTC+13). It will skip December 30, 2011.
2011/12/30 in Samoa will never exist or have existed, which is entirely odd.
Brills Peng has written up a nice description of his scheduler work for Google Summer of Code, with details on what it does, and how to try it out. Best of all, he plans to keep working on it!
Another batch of code has arrived from Google Summer of Code student work. In this case, it’s code from Adam Hoka’s “Implementing a mirror target for device mapper” project, committed by Alex Hornung. I think there’s potentially more to come.
Ferruccio Zamuner is doing a lightning talk about DragonFly at the sixth annual Italian Perl Workshop, September 9th in Turin, Italy. I mentioned this back in May, but now there’s a concrete date, and it’s about a week and a half away.
If DragonFly/x86_64 fails to install on your system, but DragonFly/i386 works, try again. Sepherosa Ziehau has a fix for the keyboard controller that may make x86_64 systems boot DragonFly when previously they did not.
The next release of pkgin, the binary package installer for pkgsrc, is imminent. I link to the note about this because the new features list sounds good, including a significant speedup.
Google Summer of Code for 2011 just finished, and there’s already source code from it showing up in DragonFly. In this case, scheduler work, including multiple schedulers. I’ll have a more detailed report soon…
As part of a larger thread, Chris Turner went into a longer explanation of how PPTP connections work. Do you have PPTP working on DragonFly? Please share details!
If you’re committing something to DragonFly, or even just working on your own Git repository so as to submit a patch, the new-to-me-and-not-actually-secret committer(7) man page has a lot of tips. I’m linking to it because it holds a lot of information that otherwise would be something you’d have to soak up over time from the community, maybe.
Tim Bisson has posted a new batch of patches putting TRIM support into DragonFly. He has a graph in there too!
If you have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4321 or 4322 model, Sascha Wildner’s just added support for them in the hptiop(4) driver, taken from FreeBSD.
Assertions, in DragonFly, are places in the code where the programmer lists a condition, and tells the system to panic if the condition doesn’t exist. It’s a good way to guard against weird situations, when something ends up with a strange value. Do you actually use them while programming? Then Adam Hoka’s patch to print file name and line number when the assertion hits will be useful to you.
It sounds like I’m about to mention something pirate-themed, doesn’t it? Brendan Kosowski needs the rum(4) driver, for (I think) Ralink RT2501USB and RT2601USB wireless. He’s willing to offer a bounty of $100 to anyone who can get it working before the next DragonFly release. Work on it if you can port, or add money if you can use it.
Francois Tigeot took an old Summer of Code proposal, VFS Quotas, and started running with it. He’s made some progress, as he detailed in a recent post to kernel@ (with code!) , but the nullfs-mount nature of PFSs in Hammer are making it difficult.
Sepherosa Ziehau continues his relentless network feature improvement/porting: this time, adding the ability for DragonFly to recognize more varieties of Broadcom hardware.
Apparently, if you are running IPv6, and using radvd (Linux)/rtadvd (BSD) to autoconfigure your hosts with IPv6 addresses, you need to tell your DragonFly hosts to accept this.