O-Reilly’s OnLAMP.com has a new FreeBSD Basics article up titled “Building Binary PC-BSD Packages“, which talks about the slick-sounding PC-BSD package superset of the FreeBSD port system.
In a conversation about having lots of RAM, Matthew Dillon described the relationship of vnodes to memory, and how you rarely want to change it.
UnixAdmin.com has an article up about building a widget for systems admin (Normally Mac-specific, but maybe not much longer), solutions to phishing attacks, and a guide on the venerable but useful tools iostat, vmstat, and netstat.
Several people more educated than I have chimed in with comments that describe the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip. Read the comments to be enlightened.
DragonFly BSD 1.4 Release Candidate 2 is out. I think there are no outstanding issues to hold up release at this point…
Matthew Dillon is planning for a January release for 1.4; while a good number of bugs have been found and squashed, there’s still a problem with network interface removal that needs to be fixed before release. However, a second release candidate will be assembled tonight.
I have a lot of little items mostly about the 1.4 transistion, so I’m just going to dump them all out:
* There’s a 1.4 cvsup file that will track the 1.4 release. This will be in the 1.2 release too, as soon as I figure out how, or someone tells me how to commit to a tag.
* the ‘.sh’ suffix requirement for rc scripts is dropped from 1.4 onward; this may happen to 1.4 too. This is needed for some pkgsrc scripts that do not end in .sh.
* cvsup is going to be replaced , one way or another.
* DragonFly will never be binary-compatible with FreeBSD 5+.
* Please, won’t somebody fix rcorder?
A contributor over at the #NetBSD Community Blog called me out on my errors. I corrected my goof on CGD, but I need someone to explain what the difference between pkgsrc and pkgsrc-wip is. I know one’s a “work in progress”, but that doesn’t answer what the relationship is between the two, or how pacakges may move between them. I’m calling you smarty-pants out on the rug now – I want you to answer what 30 seconds of web surfing has not!
“Ed” posted a quote about STM – Software Transactional Memory – where memory usage in a multiprocessor situation is treated in a similar fashion to the way transactions are used in a database. Matthew Dillon wrote a lengthy response describing how DragonFly matches or improves on that system.
You may need to update your $PATH for pkgsrc when moving to 1.4, as the upgrade doesn’t necessarily change it for you. Fresh installs will be fine, however.
UnixReview.com has the “2004-2005 Annual SAGE Salary Survey” available on their site; skim it and look for your salary range.
The first release canidate for 1.4 is available now. A changelist will be available after Christmas Day, with the official release following.
How’s Joerg Sonneberger’s bulk builds of pkgsrc for DragonFly going? It’s like this. The relevant stats for those too impatient to read: 4,269 packages built out of 5,742 (75% success rate).
The BSD Installer is at version 2.0; this is not yet (I think) the version included with DragonFly BSD. The web page isn’t updated yet, but it’s downloadable. Note that the download is just the installer, without an operating system to install.
If you have an account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org, the pkgsrc-wip code is available at /archive/NetBSD-pkgsrc/wip or /usr/pkgsrc/wip. (softlink)
pkgsrc-wip, as I understand it – see comments, is the current version of pkgsrc. pkgsrc is normally released with new versions on a quarterly basis; following pkgsrc-wip gets the Work In Progress version. Less stable, more up to date.
As the final changes for the 1.4 release go in, Matthew Dillon describes the release plans as such:
I’ll be rolling the release branch thursday evening and start playing around with version numbers and release tags and such!
The official release will not occur until a day or two after Christmas.
Joseph Garcia has added a commit history to his DragonFly BSD wiki page. It’s a nice summation of major code changes.
Among other things, UnixReview.com has a review of “Routing TCP/IP, Volume I, Second Edition”, and an interesting article called “Forensic Tools in Court“.
Matthew Dillon has placed the slides from his recent presentation at BayLISA on the DragonFlyBSD website; his post describes some details about the content there.
Going by Jennifer Davis’s comment, video of the event should be on video.google.com in January.
If you’re wondering how Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert made a Mercurial version of the DragonFly source code, check his recent post that links to his script.
Incidentally, browsing to http://chlamydia.fs.ei.tum.de/hg/dragonfly-src will give you a list of recent source changes that have been picked up by the Mercurial repo. Even better: it comes as an RSS feed!