Matthew Dillon, as part of a larger discussion, chimed in with some sensible descriptions of licensing and how it applies to the recent OpenBSD/Linux kerfuffle.
Noah Yan posted how to apply his recent patch for building an AMD64 kernel. Be warned; it does not create a full usable system – yet.
pcc has been added to NetBSD (via pkgsrc) and OpenBSD, and Steve Mynott has been messing with it on DragonFly. It doesn’t work as a replacement for GCC, but it looks promising. There are other alternatives in progress, too.
This week, BSDTalk talks about sysjail, the Open/NetBSD version of FreeBSD ‘jail’, with Michael Dexter. (Yes, I realize that’s an oversimplification.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has a patch that makes it possible to assign polling(4) to specific CPUs.
Update: There’s a new version of that patch.
If enabling ACPI means that some of the devices attached to your computer can’t be found, YONETANI Tomokazu has a patch that may fix it.
Chris Turner is also a new DragonFly developer with commit access. Welcome, Chris.
DragonFly’s newest developer with commit access: Noah Yan, already known to be working on the AMD64 version of DragonFly. Welcome, Noah.
There’s a good number of commits to DragonFly that I don’t mention on the Digest because they are relatively small, or not necessarily part of a larger plan. However, I’ll take a minute to mention the work by Sascha Wildner; he has kept the man pages in DragonFly up-to-date almost single-handedly, and done an excellent job. How good? See this excerpt from the IRC channel #dragonflybsd on EFNet:
(17:17:57) corecode: wow linux man pages are unreadable
(17:18:00) corecode: incomprehensive
(18:11:52) _hasso_: corecode: linux doesn’t have swildner ;P
YONETANI Tomokazu reports that DragonFly will boot on his Core 2 Duo MacBook Pro, though Daniel Tralamazza reports it won’t boot on his 1st generation MacBook Pro. I didn’t know this was possible…
Update: Darn.
If you haven’t already, you should make sure your NFS mounts can be put into the background. Sooner or later, it’ll save you a lot of waiting.
Dave Hayes posted his scheme for upgrading OpenSSL on a DragonFly 1.8 system to the latest version. This is useful if you haven’t yet moved to 1.10.1, and want to avoid recent OpenSSL security issues.
Linux Weekly News is reporting that AMD is planning to move away from binary driver support to an open-source driver, though the majority of the work will still originate from outside the company. That makes better 3D support on DragonFly at least possible. (via aggelos on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
BSDStats.org is reporting month-on-month increases in the number of reporting clients for almost every BSD flavor; while it’s not the most scientific method of reporting usage numbers, it’s the most scientific one I know of.  It’d be nice to see some more DragonFly hosts in there. (hint hint)
Undeadly.org has more coverage of the ongoing license issues. It is currently halfway between legally serious and Internet drama.
As a followup on the relicensing issue, Theo De Raadt wrote a description of the issues, with his central point: you can’t modify a license (i.e. remove a BSD license) without the agreement of the author. (via Undeadly)
Edit: Changed title for a better description.
Will Backman has no interviewee this week on BSDTalk. Instead, he extols the virtues of the command line.
Some light reading: a recent conversation on an OpenBSD mailing list about what they deal with in terms of closed-source binary files, and another one on the relicensing of files under both the GPL and a BSD license. Both are nicely presented on Kerneltrap.
EuroBSDCon is coming up in about 2.5 weeks; there will be, instead of a “Works In Progress” session, a poster session.
If you aren’t familiar with the concept, scientific conferences often have poster sessions, where people document their work on a single large sheet, post it with others, and answer questions as others come by to view the data on display. There are more in-depth explanations for the curious.
Dru Lavigne has put together a DVD with multiple BSDs included, along with documentation. It’s for use by people studying for the BSDA, which I haven’t covered enough lately.