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.
Matthew Dillon posted more and more about his vkernel progress, including build instructions. Further discussion described the vkernel work as similar to User Mode Linux, with the potential for acceleration.
Matthew Dillon has posted a list of what remains on his virtual kernel work, along with the news that it can partially boot – see his post for the progress. It should be ready shortly after the next release. If you want to help, one of the needed things is a virtual network interface, perhaps similar to Qemu’s tap.
The Register has an interesting old story that describes (and links to more of the story) how Bill Joy put together vi. (Thanks, duplicate postville)
Jeremy C. Reed wrote in to announce a new book. He’s created this wiki for the purpose of writing the “Quick Guide to BSD Administration”, which uses the BSDA Certification Requirements Document as a guideline. There’s regularly generated PDFs to show progress.
From OpenCon 2006, a presentation on OpenBSD Culture. I link to this in part because soft of the community ideas apply to DragonFly, and also because what makes up an open-source development group is rarely discussed beyond the code level. (Thanks Undeadly)
A few of the mirrors out there have DragonFly source available through rsync; Peter Avalos describes the correct command to retrieve it from theshell.com. (Note: read that post for details before trying it yourself.)
One of the eternal chicken-and-egg problems is kernel modification. Sometimes, a freshly installed system requires a different kernel, but you can’t download the source to build that new kernel until those changes are made. However, kernel source will be included with the 1.8 release, so this should theoretically not be a problem.
Matthew Dillon posted a list of the various ways testing could be done over the next 4 weeks for the 1.8 release. Help out, if you’ve got the inclination.
Matthew Dillon has announced that the next release will be branched in two weeks (Jan. 14th), with the 1.8 release scheduled for Jan. 28th. Get stuff in/tested now if you want to be in 1.8! He’s also updated his online diary with the extensive list of what’s gone in since 1.6.
Petr Janda linked to a review of the open-source ‘Nouveau’ NVIDIA drivers, which plan to have 3D support.
Also, Gergo Szakal found that a recent poll on the Hungarian Unix Portal listed DragonFly as the 4th most popular BSD-based operating system – more popular than NetBSD.
If you could use over $100 USD, Petr Janda needs someone to port the getcontext and swapcontext calls to DragonFly’s libc, and he’s willing to pay the aforementioned money for it. Hop on now and make some quick money.
Undeadly.org has a review of “The OpenBSD Packet Filter Book“, which is Jeremy C. Reed’s version of the PF FAQ and other material, in printed form. It’s available through Lulu.com print-on-demand. DragonFly is mentioned in there, as we (along with I think pretty much every other BSD) also use PF.
User ‘Haidut’ wrote up some notes on how he got DragonFly to boot from a USB stick. (Summary: it just worked.)