It’s not possible yet, but Matthew Dillon outlined the steps needed to get checkpointing and virtual kernels working together – you could start a kernel, and ‘freeze’ its state – even sending the resultant file to someone to restart and debug.
DragonFly picks up a passing mention in this blog post of someone fighting with pkgsrc on Linux. DragonFly 1.8 itself get tried by this developer, but rejected because KDM won’t work.
Jonathan Weeks noticed this thread about DragonFly’s 1.8 release on OSNews, with much ensuing discussion. (it’s somewhat partisan, so don’t put too much work into reading it.)
Matthew Dillon mentioned that he was trying to decide on what filesystem to use that would help with clustering. The general consensus is “ZFS“, but other filesystems entered the conversation, like LFS (still working on NetBSD) and Plan 9. Also: an explanation of filesystem snapshots.
Matthew Dillon has a rather lengthy writeup of the needs of a filesystem in a clustered latent environment. (i.e. DragonFly’s goal)
This wasn’t on DragonFly, but it can apply: a BSDNexus post detailed the benchmark differences between Win4BSD, VMWare, and native Windows.
Found on the web: WarpBSD, a “project to incorporate OS/2 support into FreeBSD”, though it sounds like the vkernel now makes DragonFly a better choice.
UnixReview.com has 2 new articles up: “Parsing Web Form Input in CGI Shell Scripts“, which deals with the crazy notion of shell scripts handling interactive web pages, and “New Year, More Security Challenges“, which covers some U.S. federal law changes for 2007 that require computer data as part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
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“.