Matthew Dillon detailed some of the issues he wants to be resolved before the next release, and also mentioned that the next release will be the switch to using GCC3 as the default compiler, isntead of GCC 2.95 as now. Chris Pressey followed up with news of some installer improvements he wants to include.
KDE 3.4 is out. I don’t know if the FreeBSD port will build on DragonFly, yet… A “new in this version” list is available. Gnome 2.10 is currently out in the FreeBSD ports tree too.
bsdcertification.org is now available. As you may guess from the name, it’s an organization for creating a standard measurement of BSD skills, and it’s also a very good idea. Some very clever people are behind it. There’s a mailing list available, which looks like the best way to see what happens when it happens.
If you’re looking to install DragonFly to something small, like, say, a USB memory stick, Gary Allan has some links for you.
David Rhodus posted some initial results with using a 3Ware 9500 RAID controller on DragonFly. The summarized version of the thread is this: transfer rates were 30 MB/s with FreeBSD 5.3, and 152 MB/s with DragonFly.
Rongsheng Fang suggested on users@ that the easy way to track working hardware would be to emulate an OpenBSD trick: sending a dmesg.
New at UnixReview.com: tips on find, that most useful and obfusticated of utilities.
The Donations page on dragonflybsd.org has a number of new entries. Take a look, and help out if you can.
DragonFly apparently doesn’t work (easily) on a 386. This probably only affects 1 person.
ONLamp.com has a new article on sending email securely. In fact, it’s UUCP over SSH, an acronym combo I didn’t think I’d ever type. I think it’s been more than a decade since I’ve even seen a UUCP address.
Registration is open now.
Tom Hummel mentioned AMD Turion 64 laptops as a possible good fit for DragonFly, given their low power and cooling needs.
I have yet to encounter anyone who has bought one of the AMD 64-bit CPUs and been unhappy with the purchase.
Todd Willey announced on the GoBSD mailing list that a new set of pkgsrc prebuilt binaries have been placed on the gobsd.com site.
Matt Dillon mentioned that he hopes to have the next major release of DragonFly out, with journaling included in some form, before Usenix ’05 in mid-April. More info on this plus a stable tag slip are in his post.
In the ongoing discussion about journaling, Dan Melomedman linked to Paul Jarc’s “/fs“.
Matthew Dillon gave a further update on the journaling work, plus he noted (as many had hoped) that there would be no background fsck in DragonFly.
Zera William Holladay was looking for tips on where to find BSD-oriented material for a OS design class; several people replied with references to the “Design and Implementation…” book, other books, and general experience.
While talking about how to implement “undo” for disk journaling, Matthew Dillon also included some data on the relative effect of his journaling work on disk speed so far. (Look at the end of the post.)
Thomas Petazzoni posted a request on the kernel@ list for contributions to the Libre Software Meeting in July, in France.