A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Mashing together to make one post:
FreeBSD-SA-09:05.telnet and FreeBSD-SA-09:07.libc have been fixed in DragonFly.
These PC-BSD 7.1 vs. Kubuntu 9.04 Benchmarks are interesting but not that conclusive – different versions of gcc were used. (thanks J. Kanowitz) Here’s a different comparison of performance inside a VM from Ivan Voras.
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.
Hasso Tepper has updated the DRM code (from FreeBSD) with some caveats.
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.
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.
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.
Oliver Fromme has a new bootloader for FreeBSD and DragonFly. He’s added the DragonFly logo, and it looks neat. Can someone test this on physical hardware?
Freddie Cash has an interesting writeup of how he put together a very capable and cheap backup system using ZFS; this is part of a larger discussion on Hammer, ZFS, performance and solutions.
A vulnerability in telnetd code common to FreeBSD and DragonFly was just discovered; it’s been fixed in DragonFly using code from NetBSD in 1995, strangely enough. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to give people money to work. (pdf) Specifically, they have USD $30K to give to people wanting to work on FreeBSD subsystems. Fight global recession!
EuroBSDCon 2009 is being held September 18-19th in Cambridge, UK. That’s a long way off, but they just opened their call for papers.
Art & Code is March 7th, at Carnegie Mellon. “Programming for Artists” – it’s cheap, and the output should be interesting. (via)
Alas, we knew it well.
‘Timofonic’ spotted this post by an NVIDIA employee describing the changes needed for better performance/support of NVIDIA chipsets in FreeBSD. This could apply to DragonFly., though I daresay these issues would already be fixed (or at least worked on) if it wasn’t a closed-source driver.
Of course, while I’m at it, I may as well wish for a pony and a million bucks, as there’s probably business reasons for the closed-source driver that are more compelling than the opinion of Some Guy with Blogging Software Installed.
Colin Percival is looking for donations to support his work over the summer handling security issues for FreeBSD, Portsnap, and FreeBSD Update. He’s very close to meeting the goal.
Matthew Dillon is planning to start userland VFS work in about a month; this led Andreas Hauser to ask if FUSE could be brought in as for FreeBSD. Csaba Henk, who ported it to FreeBSD, said “yes, but better“!
FreeBSD 2.2.9 is released.
