The new site look has been extended to wiki.dragonflybsd.org, the CVSWeb output, and the mail archive. Also, usage of the bug tracker has increased lately, with a significant reduction in the number of outstanding bugs. If you do happen to have any pending bugs reports on the tracker (which includes posts to the bugs@ mailing list), please update or close them.
A mysterious user posted a link to the VMWare site, where you can find a DragonFly 1.6.2 VMWare image with some preloaded software. It’s entertainingly called ‘DAMP’, for ‘DragonFly + Apache + MySQL + Postgres/PHP’.
Erik Wikström and Sascha Wildner have some reading recommendations for those interested in programming for operating systems.
The next release is planned for January. Incidentally, one of the changes mentioned in that linked message is available now as a patch, for testing.
The latest bsdtalk (which I mention far less than I should) has a talk with pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam.
As Armin Arh found out recently, FreeBSD uses UFS2, which can’t be read by DragonFly. If you want to install FreeBSD and DragonFly on a system, and share drives, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a strategy.
Erik Wikstrom wrote up a mini-tutorial about cvsup, for those who want to know.
dragonflybsd.org has been given a makeover, by yours truly.
Gary Stanley (‘Ancient’ on #dragonflybsd) has posted a patch against the most recent DragonFly sources that adds SCSI domain validation. It ought to work on older releases, too.
The name isn’t exciting, but SCSI domain validation ensures your SCSI bus runs as fast as possible. If you have the hardware for it, try it out.
Also, if you’re in a testing mood, Matthew Dillon has posted a new version of kern_objcache.c, using spinlocks instead of tokens, coming from a longer conversation detailing locking models in DragonFly.
It’s been reported that most every flavor of BSD (including DragonFly) has a FireWire bug allowing a local user to dump all system memory by passing a negative value to an ioctl. This is reported as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs, though that project’s web page doesn’t list it.
Joerg Sonnenberger pointed out that it isn’t a problem on i386 systems, as copyout checks that the argument doesn’t intrude into userland or beyond address space.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s presentation and paper (PDF) about pkgsrc, from EuroBSDCon 2006, is available (See abstract). Jeffrey Hsu, another DragonFly developer, also gave two presentations.
The call for papers (check the list of people’s titles at the end of that document) has gone out for EuroBSDCon 2007.
From Sascha Wildner in #dragonflybsd: when you’re rebuilding parts of the world, use wmake instead of buildworld; the correct environment will be used, but the build will go much faster.
Matthew Dillon expounded a bit on the reasoning and method behind his kernel file reorganization.
Out of a conversation on users@, Oliver Fromme gave a list of the ports used by NFS. Someday, you may be on the other side of a firewall wondering what those ports are…
‘walt’ gave some details on configuring X to use DMPS, so that your monitor turns off when your console is inactive for extended periods. Good for conservation, but not as fun as the alternative.