DragonFly – Page 153 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2009/03/31

Help the Macys

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.

2009/03/302009/03/30

DWIMmy undo

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.

2009/03/282009/03/28

AMD64 building and testing

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)

2009/03/27

Newer DRM

Hasso Tepper has updated the DRM code (from FreeBSD) with some caveats.

2009/03/26

New committer: Stathis Kamperis

Please welcome our newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Stathis Kamperis

2009/03/25

Hammer for Linux?

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a student working on a Linux port of Hammer. This will lead to a breakout of Hammer from the DragonFly tree, too.

2009/03/252009/03/25

A lot of libc changes to look at

Peter Avalos has a large number of changes to libc in his tree. He’d like to have other eyeballs looking at them, so please read over and comment.

2009/03/222009/03/21

BSD Summer of Code projects

There is, of course, DragonFly project ideas for Google’s Summer of Code. There are also idea pages up for FreeBSD and NetBSD, both also participating this year.

2009/03/212009/03/21

Presentations fixed and added

Thanks to Archimedes Gaviola, I’ve changed out the slide presentations (that didn’t work) on the Presentations page.

I’ve also linked all 5 BSDTalk interviews of Matthew Dillon on that page – previously, only one was linked there.

2009/03/21

Builds and progress, documented

Not only is Hasso Tepper doing regular bulk builds as he fixes up more pkgsrc packages for DragonFly, he’s also posting diffs that show progress. (Every line prefixed with a – is another working package.)

2009/03/20

Ath support, almost

Dmitry Komissaroff has posted a port of wlan, ath_hal and if_ath from FreeBSD. It’s not finished because he lacks the hardware. If you’ve got the hardware, the inclination, or both, please assist.

2009/03/20

Get mentoring

If you’d like to mentor for DragonFly, as several people have expressed interest, sign yourself up at the Summer of Code site and request mentoring for DragonFly. If you sign up before the 23rd, when students can start applying, you’ll get added to the private mentors mailing list.

2009/03/18

Summer of Code 2009: we’re in!

DragonFly BSD is a participating organization in Google’s Summer of Code 2009. (See the lists of participating organizations at the Google site.)

I have an announcement message with more details on the mailing lists; the next important date is the 23rd, when students can apply. If you’re a student, start putting your proposal together and talking with others. If you can mentor, sign yourself up on the Google site and request a mentoring spot.

2009/03/182009/03/18

Progress with clang

Alex Hornung has done some preliminary work with llvm/clang, and has successfully compiled a GENERIC DragonFly kernel, and completed a buildworld, using it. He also has some very nice notes available detailing the work. There’s potential for cross-BSD work with FreeBSD on this one, too.

2009/03/17

growisofs tips

If you’re using growisofs (or K3b) to burn your DVDs and having some trouble, here’s some tips that may get it working.

2009/03/16

New Hammer feature

Matthew Dillon has added a “rebalance” feature to Hammer, which cleans up the underlying B-Tree structures in Hammer that might otherwise slow down searching. It’s considered experimental, so be careful with it for now.

2009/03/15

Details on vkernel

While these details have probably been explained before, Matthew Dillon has a nice summary of how the vkernel system works, for your weekend reading.

2009/03/14

Some pkgsrc oddities

If you feel ambitious, Hasso Tepper has a few pkgsrc items that don’t build on DragonFly, and he hasn’t found out why yet. Anyone with experience and/or ideas about these packages is welcome to make suggestions.

2009/03/13

Another project: signals

Someone want to fix up siginfo?

2009/03/13

Qemu Howto

For those wanting to build Qemu right now on DragonFly, Hasso Tepper has published instructions on how to compile from Qemu’s development trunk.