DragonFly – Page 136 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2009/12/30

Messylaneous for 2009/12/30

It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.

Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE. This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too…
pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel. Will it work for other BSDs? I hope so, eventually.
The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 – give if you get a chance. Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets? I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video. (via) Kernighan’s book, “The Practice of Programming“, with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.

2009/12/29

4k disk sector support

Newer disks are moving to 4KB sectors (more info), instead of the 512-byte sectors that have been in use for… decades? There’s been some recent discussion on how to support this, for booting DragonFly. It should otherwise work.

2009/12/282009/12/28

Chaos Communication Congress notes

Matthias Schmidt is posting to Twitter about his time at 26c3 with other DragonFly developers, on his own feed and in @dragonflybsd. (if you are reading this via a Twitter link, you may already know that.) Follow the #26c3 tag if you want to see all the news about the event. A quick scan shows some interesting mobile phone security problems have been discovered. There’s streaming video too.

2009/12/282009/12/28

Multiprocessor work so far

Matthew Dillon is working on moving more of DragonFly out from under the Giant Lock. This may mean some instability this week if you’re following the bleeding-edge. He’s already posted a warning and an explanation (with numbers!) of work already completed.

2009/12/272009/12/27

pfSense on a podcast

BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called “FLOSS 101 Weekly”, now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense. (via) It’s a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly – specifically, the installer.

2009/12/25

Pkgsrc-current packages tested

I (that’s Justin Sherrill, for those reading this other places than the Digest) finished a build of pkgsrc-current on DragonFly 2.4.1 – these packages are available, though soon to be outdated by the pkgsrc-2009Q4 release, due 2010/01/01. This build was mostly to check compatibility before the release.

2009/12/23

Messylaneous for 2009/12/23

Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist. And he used DragonFly!

Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play. Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld?

Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly – I am a big fan of that idea.

top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.

2009/12/21

lwkt_token speedups and other improvements

Matthew Dillon has refactored the lwkt_token code, for an unspecified speed improvement. He’s been doing a lot of MP-lock cleanup recently…

2009/12/20

Avalon (and therefore pkg_radd) is up again

Avalon.dragonflybsd.org was power cycled, so pkg_radd works now, as does git.dragonflybsd.org.

2009/12/20

MPLOCK graphing

I love love graphs, and Alex Hornung has created a graph showing the lock contention on a DragonFly system during a buildkernel. (ganked from EFNet #dragonflybsd on IRC)

2009/12/20

Package download problems

avalon.dragonflybsd.org is temporarily down, so pkg_radd will not work unless you set $BINPKG_BASE to a new mirror.

2009/12/192009/12/19

Too much RAM for x86_64?

If you have previously tried 64-bit DragonFly on a system with more than 3G of RAM and it failed to boot, the problem is fixed.

2009/12/18

Digest Twitterfication

Thanks to the urging and help of Matthias Schmidt and Saifi Khan, posts on the DragonFly Digest now also show on Twitter, as @dragonflybsd. (well, except for this one, as it would be redundant.)

2009/12/18

Kernels without warning

Sascha Wildner has added -Werror to the kernel build process. Warnings will now result in an error that stops the kernel from building. If you’re a developer, this will force you to create warning-free code when doing kernel development. If you’re a user, this will result in a cleaner, more stable kernel.

2009/12/162009/12/15

Vi, nvi, vim, variety

Alexander Polakov has suggested that nvi (what you get when you type vi) should be replaced with traditional vi, since that would deliver UTF-8 support, and nvi appears to no longer be updated. Other than one objection on split screens, I daresay everyone who needs more features treats the system vi as a fallback and has moved to a new editor. (or that)

2009/12/162009/12/15

New version of ncurses to test

Jan Lentfer has created an update for ncurses in DragonFly, but wants further testing. Give it a try if you use a curses-based application.

2009/12/15

Time for a buildkernel

If you’re running DragonFly 2.5, Matthew Dillon has changed thread and process structures, meaning that a full rebuild of kernel and modules is necessary on the next system update.

2009/12/14

Graphical loader, please

I’m pretty sure I’ve linked to this before, but: Oliver Fromme has a graphical bootloader (see example) which can work on DragonFly. I’d love to see this on DragonFly.

Coincidentally, this article makes an argument for graphic improvements for BSD systems in general that I agree with.

2009/12/14

A little more MP

Matthew Dillon has moved the Big Giant Lock off of a whole bunch of syscalls. This should make a noticeable difference in a multiprocessing context, though I don’t have measured results to point at. (hint, hint…)

2009/12/132009/12/12

simplepbulk: bulk build wrapper

I have a wrapper script I use for bulk builds of pkgsrc that I think others would find usable. If you are interested in building some/all of pkgsrc to generate binary packages using pbulk, may I recommend “simplepbulk“? I’d like to see if anyone uses it on non-DragonFly systems.