Stéphanie Ouillon expressed interest in the virtio drivers as a Google Summer of Code project for DragonFly; Aggelos Economopoulos followed up with an explanation of the various work that’s been done, and further resources. I chimed in with my usual warning.
Sascha Wildner’s removed the meteor(4) code because it apparently no longer builds, and it’s unlikely anyone uses an actual video board that requires this driver, at this point. If you do, speak up.
Matthew Dillon’s improved bridging to the point where you can now modify the MAC address of the bridge and most everything, including ARP, will come from it correctly. It’s even possible to bond 2 or more interfaces together, with the side effect of dragonflybsd.org having a lot more bandwidth.
Update: the config for his bonded interfaces has been posted as an example.
Update 2: More notes here.
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
Matthew Dillon has continued his bridge work, with another commit adding various features. Go, read.
Venkatesh Srinivas did a comparison of the default scheduler in DragonFly with the “fairqueue” scheduler, using Interbench, the “interactivity benchmark”. The numbers don’t show a deficit relative to either side, which is OK I guess? I’m not sure how to analyze it.
I posted before about a move to use AT&T’s U-Verse fiber/DSL product for dragonflybsd.org’s connection. It led Matt Dillon to try to add features to compensate for the service’s shortcomings, but it’s still problematic. He’s written up just how broken U-Verse is, calling it “almost a complete failure” as a business connection. The bulk of the problems seem to come from the 2Wire DSL modem supplied by AT&T.
Remember when the Internet used to be the place to find long technical writeups of a product directly from people who were using it? Much of that has disappeared into comment forms and ephemeral Facebook posts. That’s too bad.
You can probably infer the new (to me) blog I found this week from some of the links…
- Adding IPv6 to a FreeBSD Mail/Web Server – from Michael Lucas, repeat BSD author. I link to this because we’re all going to have to do something similar in the next year or so, I bet..
- A visual guide to TMUX, part 1 and part 2. tmux has usually been introduced to me as “It’s BSD-licensed and not screen”, which is good, but not compelling on its own. The first of the articles linked here goes over the comparative differences in some detail. (via)
- Speaking of screen-ish things, do you leave an irssi session running in screen so that you can rejoin IRC conversations at any time? I sure do. Sometimes I even reconnect through ConnectBot on my Android phone. There’s now a Connectbot variation for irssi, just for people who do such a thing. Don’t forget: #dragonflybsd on EFNet.
- Also still on the topic: forgetting to use screen and then being stuck with a long-running process is lousy. There’s ways to deal with it, though. (via, from a blogroll link)
- Hey, it’s neat to see a new business built on BSD – OpenBSD, in this case: Tunnelr. (via)
- We’re still doing great in terms of pkgsrc packages building successfully on DragonFly.
- An hour+ recording of the recent NYCBUG meeting about BSD networking is online. (Link is to a MP3 – via)
- How not to comment code.
- AT&T -> BSD -> AT&T.
Matthew Dillon has added transparent bridging, mostly to overcome issues with the AT&T DSL modem he’s using. With this non-default feature, IP packets retain the original MAC address when retransmitted through a new interface.
The dragonflybsd.org sites (well, www anyway) are getting a new network connection, so expect a bit of downtime due to the transition.
For those of you thinking of IPv6 (and you should be), Matthias Rampke reported good luck with an IPv6 tunneling service. He points out that the /48 address he now has at home is larger than the entire IPv4 network.
The virtio network drivers for DragonFly (mentioned previously here, here, and here) went away. Apparently the original FreeBSD code was not supposed to be available publicly, under a BSD license, and it’s having a knock-on effect for DragonFly and probably NetBSD.
(virtio drivers, if this is an unfamiliar term, are for devices in virtual environments, as when DragonFly is running under VMWare or something similar.)
February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
pkgin, the binary pkgsrc manager similar to apt/yum, is now at version 0.4.0. You can get it now if you use pkgsrc-current, or just wait for the next quarterly pkgsrc release.
Do you have a Western Digital model 1021 external disk drive? Matthias Rampke does, and he found he had to make some USB quirk entries to get it to work reliably.
The tmpfs(5) filesystem now runs without multiprocessor locks. Yay! Another hurdle down.
ps now has a new option: -R. This lists processes in order by parent/child status, and indents to make it visually clear. It looks like this. I wish someone had done this 15 years ago.
As Matthew Dillon notes in a recent post, procedures are now assumed to be MPSAFE (i.e. without the Giant Lock) by default. Any new work should follow this idea, and it doesn’t have to be documented specially. The inverse used to be true, where the code that happened to work without the Lock was rare, and therefore needed to be pointed out. Now, the good result is the norm.
The winners of Google Code-In have been posted. They win a trip to Google (remember, they are 13-18 years old) and an impressive item on their resume. And yes, some of those names there worked on DragonFly projects.
Nuno Antunes has been working on upgrading netgraph(4) to version 7. His initial patches are available for testing.