Inspired in part by the semi-regular status reports for FreeBSD, I put together (with help from a number of people, including Hiten Pandya and David Rhodus) a DragonFly status report for 2003.
I’ve cleaned up my local archive of the DragonFly discussion groups so that start and end dates are correct; they are available at http://www.shiningsilence.com/mailarchive/.
Paul Herman, Senior Researcher of the Kitchen Refrigerator, has a really nice writeup about time and clocks in operating systems (with graphs, even!), and work he wants to bring into DragonFly.
Michal Pasternak posted a plea for use of Pkgsrc to the submit discussion group. Given that he specifically said he wasn’t participating in that group and wasn’t going to do any work to make pkgsrc compatible, and that VFS is not yet complete, that’s probably as far as it will go. I’m editorializing.
YONETANI Tomokazu reported his laptop was running very hot with DragonFly. The CPU was running when it didn’t need to be; Matt Dillon fixed this.
Peter Kadau has been talking about changing the userland scheduler (which could be done dynamically, as Matt Dillon pointed out) and a post out of that discussion by Matt Dillon does a nice job of summing up the differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD-5 process management.
Joerg Sonnenberger has been adding a lot of port overrides – freetype2, xmms, etc. Always make sure to check dfports first when you want to add software.
Dan Melomedman, during a discussion about using/not using bash in the base system, pointed at execline as a better alternative to shell scripting.
David Leimbach and others have kdebase from CVS building now.
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down, and the news server is not responding. I don’t know if this is planned or not.
Update an hour later: It’s OK.
Not much happening right now. A few people have noticed that the binary NVIDIA driver doesn’t seem to work; big surprise there, with the system being in rapid change. Otherwise, puttering with the new RCNG services layout continues. In local news, I have the DragonFly mail archive mostly working now, including the kernel list.
A dfports update for net/bsd-airtools has been committed; Craig Dooley noted that the device layout for DragonFly has changed, making this override needed.
Matt Dillon has enhanced the varsym/RCNG system to support the following “states” for various services:
| running | The service is running |
| failed | A start or stop operation failed |
| disabled | The service is disabled |
| irrelevant | The server is not needed |
| configured | The non-process service has been configured |
| stopped | The service has been stopped |
He also posted the following:
“Call for volunteers! There are many
rc.d/scripts which do not support ‘stop’. Things likesshdandrwho, for example. It would be great if interested parties could start adding ‘stop’ functionality to the more common services. Submit patch sets to submit@dragonflybsd.org”
From Murray Stokely by way of Matt Dillon; a request for papers about BSD system use to present this summer in Boston:
“UseBSD will be a one-day special interest group session hosted as part of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston (June 27 – July 2, 2004). The focus of UseBSD, as the name implies, will be on showcasing ways in which creative members of the BSD community are making use of BSD-on the desktop, in embedded applications, in corporate data centers, in computational clusters, in business environments, and more!”
There’s a new Team page on the DragonFly website. I’m the one that put it together.
Jeroen Ruigrok has previously sent in patches to autoconf that allow it to recognize DragonFly as a system, and this should now be in autoconf CVS.
Matt Dillon posted 2 scripts he finds handy for searching in the source tree. The first one is used on its own, with the argument being the search target:
#!/bin/csh
#
# /usr/local/bin/search
find . -type f -and -not -name '*.*o' -and -not -name '*.a' -and -not -name '*.kld' | fgrep -v ./compile | xargs egrep "$argv" | egrep -v 'Binary'
And the other script, used to pull files containing the searchterm into an editor like so: ‘vi `pullout searchterms`’
#!/bin/csh
#
# /usr/local/bin/pullout
/usr/local/bin/search $argv | awk -F : '{ print $1; }' | sort | uniq
Dave Leimbach pointed at Cyclone during a discussion of dealing with insecure functions like sprintf() and strcopy()