A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Sascha Wildner’s added the cxm(4) driver, which supports Hauppauge PVR-250/350 video capture cards. Hasso Tepper kindly donated the hardware for testing.
I’ll note here that I have a Hauppauge TV card (848 chipset, I think) that’s possibly the oldest continuously functioning computer equipment I own; I’ve been using it for close to a decade without a single problem. I have nothing else that has reached the benchmark.
Student projects for Google Summer of Code will be announced this Monday, for DragonFly, and for all other participating organizations. DragonFly has 5 slots, and more than 5 excellent proposals, which is a good kind of problem to have. We’ll see what we can fit.
Sdävtaker came up with a potential idea for encrypting backup files, and Matthew Dillon followed up with another way that uses Hammer.
Daniel Lorch is working on a port of Hammer to Linux’s VFS, though since he’s using FUSE, it will be able to reach other systems, like NetBSD. The code is accessible.
Peter Avalos imported OpenSSL-0.9.8k. I think. I saw him make room, but the actual commit didn’t come through on the mailing list, so I’m not sure.
In related news, the 1.0 version of OpenSSL appears to be coming up.
Is DragonFly vulnerable to a recently found pf issue? Nope, thank goodness.
Antonio Huete Jimenez reports that DragonFly now can install and run without issue on VirtualBox 2.2.0; it had been unable to work in previous releases.
Matthew Dillon is trying to track down a Hammer bug where directory entries (files, usually) are missed, whether it’s with ls or find or similar. Has this happened to you? It’s apparently very hard to duplicate, so please speak up if it has.
Hasso Tepper reported on the results of Peter Avalos’s major libc changes; someone retiring libc_r would help, as would someone figuring out why unistd.h isn’t found on DragonFly.
Naoya Sugioka has some preliminary patches for kqemu on DragonFly. In testing, he found it made qemu run slower, which is the opposite of its purpose, so he’d appreciate suggestions.
Peter Avalos has made major changes to DragonFly’s libc; you can look at the commits page or check out his git repo for details. If you are running 2.3, you will need to do a full buildworld on your next update.
You may also need to rebuild pkgsrc packages; I’m build a new binary set for 2.3 now.
Have you installed Drupal on DragonFly? How well did it work for you? Colin Adams would like to know. (I’m 99% sure it will work.)
Update: Yes, it works.
If you’re a student with a Summer of Code application, make sure to subscribe to it. Doing this will ensure you are automatically notified of any mentor requests for more information.
There’s also some recent stats published by Google on the applications so far; DragonFly is one of the surveyed orgs it mentions, and the results are the same – less applications, better quality.
My plans for building binary packages for pkgsrc are detailed in this message to the mailing lists. No timeline yet…
The due date for the Summer of Code proposals is past, and DragonFly has 18 proposals. The consensus from other SoC organizations is the same: less applicants everywhere this year, but the proposal quality is up.
Potential mentors can now discuss the proposals and ask for more detail from the students, until April 15th.
19:00 UTC today is the deadline for all student applications for Google’s Summer of Code program. You can revise applications up to April 15th based on feedback, but the initial proposal has to be in the system as of tonight. That’s 5 hours from now, if I have my time calculations correct.
DragonFly has 15 applications at this point, and general application quality looks to be better this year than last.
Matthew Dillon and Jordan Gordeev have done further work on AMD64 support; it’s progressing quickly. Check that first link for a hint on how to install correct boot code.
This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues. Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly. Another side of his story has come to light. He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.
It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.
Hammer’s ‘undo’ now has the ability to index and automatically diff historical versions of files for you, thanks to a patch from Joel K. Pettersson. (He’s got more ideas, too.
Mathtew Dillon has added an automatic building and testing environment for AMD64 support. This one command will build an entire boot image, along with qemu to run it in, though some issues with compiling qemu remain. (Related)