Category: Goings-on

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()

Ryan Dooley proposed adding ProPolice to the base system, and already has a potential patch.

Matt Dillon will be finishing up IPC using the model mocked up in libcaps. This will enable functions like getpwuid() as an IPC serviceand out of libc. If I recall correctly, IPC = Inter-Process Communication, as acronyms are a common question lately.

Jos Backus pointed at buildtool as an alternative to the various auto* tools.

Peter Kadau noted that if you are building a program such as XFree86 and it complains about not being able to find a particular library that you know exists on your system, you can use cpdup to move it (between, for instance, /usr/local/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib).

This is a temporary fix. However, if you are experiencing this right now, it’s probably because of an out-of-date dfports. Delete all packages, update, and reinstall packages, and you should be OK.

Matt Dillon’s updated his diary.

Matt Dillon has created ‘live CD’ features, so you can boot from a DragonFly CD and get to a useable prompt. To support this, cpdup is now included in /bin, and mount_mfs now has the -C option, which will automatically copy a read-only filesystem into a MFS mount. An experimental ISO is available on the download page.

Be warned that you will have to lay out filesystems on your own with fdisk, disklabel, etc., and this is largely undocumented, except in the README.
Continue reading “‘live CD’ available”

So, it looks like this:

From an offhand comment Matt Dillon made, the first ‘release’ of Dragonfly is planned at least several months from now. (No definite date yet.) FreeBSD-5 should be entering a stable branch (5.3) around the same time, and the stable 2.6 Linux kernel should be appearing around mid-December, close to the same time as FreeBSD 5.2. KDE 3.2 should also be out in February. Gnome 2.6 is due in March.

So, early 2004 looks like it will have much to play with.

Not much to report, in part because of the U.S. holiday, so here’s a link to a recently-announced OpenBSD variant: ekkoBSD.

Matt Dillon has pictures posted from the BSD Party.

Normally I wait until the commit happens before I note new code, but the next few days will be hectic. Max Laier submitted patches to add PF, Erik Paulsen Skaalerud is working on ALTQ, and Craig Dooley added support for the Intel mobile ICH4 ATA chipset.

Probably in part because of a long-running off-topic SCO thread in dragonfly.kernel, ‘trent’ suggested an advocacy or general group. Matt Dillon said “in a few months, just prior to the first release”.

Emiel Kollof plans to change the Heimdal utilities to a format more similar to other platforms, unless someone else wants it.

In a conversation about updating bind, several people noted that changes other than vendor updates to contrib can wait until there’s a complete packaging system in place. (i.e. things like bind and sendmail are staying in place, for now.)

In a followup to the K42 post, Max Laier pointed at the L4Ka project, which is somewhat similar in scope.

Michal Ostrowski, a developer with the K42 project at IBM Research, posted to dragonfly.kernel and noted that DragonFly and K42 are very similar in design and could benefit from interaction. He brought up several papers located on their site: a K42 overview, K42 and traditional UNIX APIs, and K42’s threading and scheduling infrastructure. The closely-related Tornado operating system also has some good information.

I’ve been playing too much Day of Defeat; I see ‘KAR98‘ every time I read K42. The project’s not about a teutonic WW2 rifle, though – the name K42 has a different origin.