Sepherosa Ziehau has a firmware update for bce(4) (Broadcom NetXtreme II) cards. He’s been doing a lot more incidental network hardware updates I haven’t linked; thanks, Sephe!
I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.
You probably heard of this already, but hey, look! DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.
Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front. This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.
While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself. It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up. Yeah, that worked out just dandy. There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).
The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places) Here’s my story. It was, and still is, “Fupjack”. Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack. Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway. He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.
Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!” I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one. People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out. The putative theme is “BSD Security”, but there also happens to be an article featuring Hammer deduplication on real-world data, by yours truly.
I posted before about changes to the commit template for DragonFly, but Alex Hornung has written up exactly what he did, with better details on how to use it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been committing a bunch of changes for em/emx(4) and bce(4). You may have hardware that has suddenly become supported, for instance. Also, credit is due to David Christensen and Broadcom for sending hardware to test out.
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado really wants a port of DragonFly to Xen. He can’t do it himself, but he did a nice job of writing up the problem, and even found resources to help any developer wanting to take on this task.
Two completely separate and unrelated changes:
First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found. MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.
Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped. Speak up if you need them to stick around.
If you’ve had a lack of emails from the DragonFly mailing lists lately, this SORBS listing event might be why.
Do you have a Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG, 2225BG, or 2915ABG wireless card? The driver is iwi(4). It requires a kernel module and some downloadable firmware, which makes it slightly more troublesome to set up. Luckily, ‘ferz’ has written up just how to get it working.
Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’. Thanks, Jeremy!
Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers… but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests. Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against? Here’s the moment to note that.
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
Pkgsrc bmake bootstrap, that is. There’s a new version of bmake, and it needs to be tested on every platform possible.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.
Do you have a Via CPU? Do you use padlock(4)? (The driver for cryptographic functions, which Via processors support with hardware acceleration) Alex Hornung made some untested changes to support the hardware random number generator, but he needs people to test it.
The pkgsrc ‘freeze’ in preparation for the pkgsrc-2011Q2 branch is coming up, starting this Sunday the 19th. This means the quarterly release will be tagged in about 2 weeks, and I’ll probably have binary packages built for DragonFly about a week or so after that.
BSDDay Argentina is starting to look for speakers. The official site doesn’t list 2011 dates yet, but it’ll be in November, in Buenos Aires. (via Damian Vicino) Alex Hornung gave a DragonFly presentation there last year…
Venkatesh Srinivas is making vmobj_token and vm_token much more fine-grained. That’s great, but watch out over the next few weeks as this work goes into 2.11. (i.e. don’t upgrade your DragonFly 2.11 unless you are ready for surprises.) Venkatesh has already found some.
Do you have a DragonFly workstation? That you play audio on? Do you have headphones hooked up? Is it using Intel High Definition Audio? (snd_hda) Does connecting the headphones disable the system speaker?
You can probably guess exactly what I’m trying to troubleshoot given the above questions.
Here’s two items I meant to post and for some reason did not:
- Sven Gaerner posted a short description of how he migrated his DragonFly system from a hard disk to a SSD. This may be useful for anyone considering a move. Decent-sized SSDs are reaching low prices these days.
- Tim Bisson posted an update on his work on TRIM support for DragonFly. The code is available now if you’re feeling lucky.