Category: Goings-on

Matthew Dillon’s been thinking about how to deal with clustering. Instead of partitioning out memory, disk, or CPU resources across the network, it’s possible to create virtual kernels that can then be broken out as individual units for local or remote tasks. (Much easier from a local security and debugging point of view.) He’s followed up with some comments on anticipated speed and relationship to a similar model of User Mode Linux (“UML”).

The bonus: this feature may be available by the time of our next release.

Update: More on security, translating between real and virtual kernels, and how it’ll significantly speed development. That last link can also be taken as a fine example of impatience.

Bill Hacker, the DragonFly mailing lists’ resident Old Person, wrote up his experiences in antediluvian times with computers that did clustering in hardware, similar to what the DragonFly project is trying to do in software.

Chris Pressey wrote a detailed list of the changes he is planning for the next version of the BSD Installer. It was on the BSD Installer mailing list, which has no web archives that I know of, so the body of the message is pasted here:

Continue reading “BSD Installer changes coming”

Jr Aquino handed in a new dragonfly photo to the project.

Matthew Dillon posted some of his thoughts on how DragonFly’s clustering support (when ready) will help the average user.

It’s a sparse week on UnixReview.com, this week: 2 book reviews, one of “C++ Standard Library Extensions” and the other of “Linux Phrasebook“.

A recent users@ conversation about using UTF-8 and other character encodings has some interesting tidbits.

Joerg Sonnenberger regularly builds binary packages for pkgsrc, for DragonFly, in parallel. This eats up a lot of disk and RAM.

He could use another 2 Gb of DDR2 RAM. This would greatly speed up builds. Got spare RAM or cash? Please help, (he’s at joerg@britannica.bec.de) as this benefits every DragonFly user. (And to a lesser extent, every pkgsrc user.)

Jeremy C. Reed has put together a new book on the pf packet filter, originally from OpenBSD but now found in all the BSDs, including DragonFly.  It’s available from his website.

The BSD Installer mailing list currently has no online archive, but it’s possible to retrieve past mailings by mailing to discussion-get.x_y@bsdinstaller.com where x and y are the number of the first and last message you want to retrieve. discussion-help@bsdinstaller.com is also available.  (Thanks, Chris Pressey)

ONLamp.com has a new article up: IPFW, which is one of the several firewalls present in DragonFly and other BSDs.

The Cache Coherency Management System, a fiendish system which will allow crazy things like mapping memory across multiple machines, mentioned before, has been started.

The somewhat perennial discussion of microkernels came up again on kernel@; start at the beginning to read the generally useful conversation.

Another how-to for today: two ways to get Flash working: Handbook method and Wiki method.

According to a recent announcement, the second AsiaBSDCon will be held on March 8-11, 2007, in the University of Tokyo, Japan.  Papers are already being solicited.

I’ve updated the online version of the Handbook to include the last 2 months of changes.  (Available as PDF and text too.)

Something I wrote myself: things you can do with a headless computer running DragonFly.

As part of a conversation about headless installation, Bill Hacker describes the old-fashioned way, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert mentioned the ‘Pre-Flight Installer‘, and Matthew Dillon described how he uses rconfig.

The modular version of xorg is predicted to be in pkgsrc in October.

For those needing an explanation: We currently have the ‘monolithic’ version.   The modular form breaks the build of xorg into parts that can be updated separately, and will be the form used for future versions.

It’s nice to see code flowing back and forthe bewteen BSD projects; the latest is OpenBSD taking advantage of the DragonFly acx(4) driver.  (Thanks, Undeadly)