OnLAMP.com has a nice interview of the people behind PC-BSD, and details on their latest release.
Jeremy C. Reed is writing an article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel, and he had some comprehensive questions. Matthew Dillon had some answers which make a good read.
An ongoing conversation about virtual kernels led to a description of just how virtual kernel and real kernel memory usage interacts; they are surprisingly well synchronized.
Matthew Dillon has synchronized Preview with the latest bleeding-edge code, to match up with the large number of commits lately.
A minor update to 1.6 is out, to incorporate some recent backpatches.
OnLAMP.com has a new article up about using PF and spamd to kill spam.
The FreeBSD Laptop Compatibility List has been resurrected. Much of what’s on that list will also apply to DragonFly, so keep it in mind for your next laptop purchase. (Thanks, BSDNews)
Joerg Sonnenberger posted to pkgsrc-users@ how he’s coming along in transitioning Xorg from the monolithic version currently in pkgsrc to the new 7.x modular version. (Short version: not yet, but soon)
A number of news sites have linked to the recent European Commission study of the economics of free/open source software (PDF). Less known but also good: There’s an article up on the Harvard Business School ‘Working Knowledge‘ site titled “The Business of Free Software.”
jscan isn’t ready for prime time, but Steve O’Hara-Smith decided to try it for backups. It sorta almost kinda works, though Matthew Dillon added some tips to show more info on how it’s working.
And for your daily vkernel news… Virtual kernels now are secure by default, meaning no loading kernel modules and no writing to kernel memory. This is disabled by a command line flag at virtual kernel start time. Also, Matthew Dillon realized that the virtual kernel automatically presents a safe way to cluster.
Matthew Dillon’s latest status report indicates he’s added asynchronous I/O to virtual kernels, for a significant speed boost. Also: the 1.8 branch is tomorrow, with release in two weeks as planned.
Now on UnixReview.com: Examining the Novell Certified Linux Professional 10 Certification, a review of the Komodo IDE (which I can’t get to work on DragonFly, darnit), and a book review of “Cisco Network Admission Control Volume II: NAC Framework Deployment and Troubleshooting“.
Matt Emmerton has ported a number of the *context calls to DragonFly; this should assist with building some 3rd-party software. It has led to some discussion of syscalls and where they need to happen. (Start at the most recent post and read back.)
Virtual kernels seems to be running stable; the branch for the 1.8 release will happen Tuesday after cleanup. While virtual kernels are primarily for development work, there’s other options. (even more options)
Sepherosa Ziehau was able to get ping working between a virtual and real host, though Matthew Dillon had trouble with DHCP. Matthew’s status report indicates floating-point works now and a buildworld (a stress test if ever there was one) comes close to completing.
Jonathan Buschmann along with some other folks is taking on the porting of CARP to DragonFly, as a student project. The idea has met with universal acclaim.
Sepherosa Ziehau has already managed to construct a virtual network connection to match virtual kernels, ridiculously quickly.
So, there’s a Gentoo/FreeBSD project, that attempts to graft the two systems together. The lead developer in that project misread the old 4-clause BSD license on some older files, and paniced repeatedly. (It even made it to the howling wasteland.) Of course, the problem is not actually a problem – it’s caused by worry about a clause that was removed years ago. Dru Lavigne has a nice writeup, and Wes Peters summed it up best in comments: “Now everybody get back to work. This is a 7-year-old nonissue…”
Matthew Dillon reports it is now possible to boot a virtual kernel and log in using that virtual system. The big remaining step (other than bugfixing) is a virtual network interface.