“ALeine” is looking to backport GEOM to FreeBSD-4/DragonFly, though Matthew Dillon indicated it’s possible, though he has other plans.
A post by Ivan Voras on kernel@ led to a useful discussion talking about tokens contrasted with mutexes.
Hubert Feyrer‘s blog mentioned the 2004 Report of the NetBSD Foundation, which mentions the new DragonFly support in pkgsrc, thanks to Todd Willey. It also links to some interesting performance followups and the new NetBSD store, among other things.
If you have a development account on leaf.dragonflybsd.org, please make sure it’s cleaned of files you don’t need – /home is getting full from all the people on there.
Josua Coombs tried out pkgsrc, and found it mostly working.
Also, pkgsrc on DragonFly now builds X.org. There will be a new pkgsrc-using build of DragonFly on gobsd.org soon.
While talking about jails, Matthew Dillon brought up the idea that a user-level virtual DragonFly system, sorta like UML, is possible.
If you have 10 minutes to waste, there’s a “Which BSD should I use” post over on Slashdot/BSD.
Andre Nathan posted a link to an interview of Matthew Dillon over at BSDNexus.com, with some good information on where DragonFly is headed in the short term.
The DragonFly mirror at bsdtech.com is down due to an employment change. (Good luck, Erik Skaalerud!) There’s a new source mirror in Riga, Latvia, located at http://alxl.info/cgi-bin/cvsweb.cgi/?cvsroot=DragonFly. Also, the new mirror at vt220.com now has HTTP access.
Maxime Labelle has a new DragonFly mirror up in Quebec, Canada, at ftp://bsd.vt220.com/.
“Ed” found that Qt 3.3.4 now explicitly supports DragonFly.
KernelTrap has an interview of Timothy Miller, who is behind the Open Graphics Project, with the admirable goal of creating a video card that works well in 2D and 3D on open source platforms. Well, Linux, mostly, but my hope springs eternal for 4+ multihead 3D displays. Engineering samples are/will be available for anyone who wants to work on a DragonFly-specific driver. (thanks, BSDNews.)
FreeBSD 4.11 has been released. This is probably the last release in the 4.x series, though it will be updated for some time yet with needed security fixes. The next DragonFly release is slated for before the USENIX Technical Conference in April, so there’s an upgrade path available…
UnixReview.com has three new articles up: one on using the man page editor ManEdit, one on the security tool Samhain, and a review of the No Starch Press book “Write Great Code — Understanding the Machine“. Incidentally, the No Starch Press book Absolute BSD (covering FreeBSD, by excellent writer Michael Lucas of Big Scary Daemons fame) is a rare thing: a book about an operating system that’s fun to read.
Guillermo Garcia Rojas has created Spanish translations of Installing DragonFly and Laptop Installation.
There’s now a Lithuanian translation of the DragonFly FAQ, on the wiki. There’s also a Polish translation out there, too, that I managed to previously miss.
ONLamp/BSD has a new BSD News report up, this time summarizing December 2004.
Google Alerts told me about a new article on OSNews titled “Flame Wars, Forks and Freedom” that mentions, among other things, DragonFly being a fork from FreeBSD. While on the forked product idea, BSDNews has a nice link up to an explanation of Xorg’s 3D support (somewhat Linuxy) in the form of DRI, which also has a wiki.
If you’re feeling particularly Gallic, there’s a Paris BSD meeting on 02/02/2005. (Thanks BSDNews.)
For some lazy weekend reading: the Cell architecture. The article’s partially hypothetical, but interesting. If consumer-level PCs using this architecture were built, DragonFly would be a good fit.