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.
A new, graphical bootloader
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?
Port of tmpfs underway
A cheap backup strategy
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.
telnetd vulnerability fixed
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)
Art & Code, EuroBSDCon, projects
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)
RIP, FreeBSD 4
Alas, we knew it well.
NVIDIA and support
‘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.
Security donations still needed
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.
Short FUSE time
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“!
April 1st always has something
FreeBSD 2.2.9 is released.