Category: Goings-on

Joshua Coombs noted he would like to work on a new firewall strategy for DragonFly, and pasted in some of his notes. They are complex enough that it’s better to paste than to sum up. (I sure could use the multiple routes he talks about.)

Pasted material follows:
Continue reading “Firewall Fun”

It looks like the PC Card problems mentioned earlier are really a problem with the DHCP client. David Rhodus is looking for someone to try a new import of the ISC DHCP code. (Updated – an import from FreeBSD-5 is happening instead, since that fixes some problems with the most recent ISC code.)

Galen Sampson found that using NFS without -maproot will cause file truncation; Matt Dillon has a temporary hack that will fix it, which will be committed by the end of the week if it works without trouble.

Matt Dillon disabled background bitmap writes, as it can apparently cause certain race conditions. He notes: “Eventually the problem background bitmap writes solved will be solved more generally by implementing page COWing durign [sic] device I/O to avoid stalls on pages undergoing write I/O.”

There’s a Slashdot article noting that Matt Dillon will be available for a Q&A session. It’s on Thursday, Oct. 9th, 9 PM EDT in SlashNET’s #forum. If you miss it, it should be later available in http://www.slashnet.org/forums/.

Emiel Kollof found that to get a PCMCIA network card going, you need to add these lines to /etc/rc.conf: (replace x’s with your static address, if applicable.)


removable_interfaces="<interface name>"
pccard_ifconfig="inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
or
pccard_ifconfig="DHCP"

John De Boskey posted he had variant symlinks working under FreeBSD 4-Stable, and notes these patches:

http://people.freebsd.org/~jwd/mlinks/freebsd-magic-patches
http://people.freebsd.org/~jwd/mlinks/env-magic-patches

And this post to freebsd-stable.

During a separate thread about microkernels (short summary: it ain’t happening), Pedro Guffuni pointed out Exokernel, a OS project where most everything was in libraries.

Emiel Kollof made a bootsplash screen at 800x600x8, available here. Download, ungzip to /boot, and put these lines in your loader.conf:


vesa_load="YES"
splash_bmp_load="YES"
bitmap_load="YES"
bitmap_name="dfly.bmp"


The screen, incidentally, looks just like the main site logo.

Mike Porter wrote an extended entry about how variant symlinks could handle multiple versions of ports being installed, including a number of special cases like Perl and the modules installed for it.
Continue reading “Variant Symlink explanations”

César Duque posted his own take on how the DragonFly page should look:
http://www.notfound.org/df (it’s a large jpeg.)

Hiten Pandya has apparently been working on a new version of the main site. Those changes are not (yet?) in CVS.

The conversation about how to handle third-party utilities in the base system is continuing. Most everyone is coming around to the idea of variant symlinks – file links that use a variable to determine destination, with that variable value determined by the rc system.

Matt Dillon added to his earlier plan with a description of the framework for this variable data, using a system MTA as an example:
Continue reading “Even more replacement”

David P. Reese, Jr. has completed the 4th stage of his work separating syscalls. This patch splits getsockopt() and setsockopt(). It’s not yet committed as of this writing, but there are no objections yet. A side benefit of this work is that calls like stackgap_init() and stackgap_alloc() can be removed, as they copy data into an area of kernel memory that’s easily overwritten.

The aforementioned K&R -> ANSI cleanups have been committed – that’s about 160 files in bin and sbin that have been cleaned up.

David Rhodus kindly pointed out to me that I missed his commit of ACPI code from Intel, back on the 23rd.

It’s not installed by default. To use it, you’ll need to add ‘device acpica’ to your kernel config file.

Matt Dillon described a mail ‘API’, where a particular MTA port would be installed into a /usr/local/ directory, and then an /etc/rc.d/mail scipt would correlate the right variables to control behavior for that MTA.

Full post added below, in case someone decides to use it as a template for work… (hint)

Also: the slab allocator is now in by default.
Continue reading “More on mail replacement”

Timothy Cava brought up the topic of removing sendmail from the base system, and what would be needed to do so without breaking many, many things. Mike Porter pointed out that an rc.mail file should be able to control it. Jeremy Messenger added that this was talked about in an earlier thread revolving around Perl and other base components from FreeBSD. David Rhodus closed this discussion, somewhat, by saying a final DragonFly BSD packaging mechanism is necessary first.

Matt Dillon posted a patch for the next stage of his namecache work. I’m pasting the intro here, where he talks about what this patch does, and some of what the last stage will do.
Continue reading “namecache, stage 2 of 3”

David Leimbach asked for links that describe what a slab allocator is, and Hiten Pandya helpfully noted Bonwick94, Bonwick2001, and linux/mm/slab.c in the Linux kernel.

Joe “Floid” Kanowitz brought up the idea of RAM being used as disk cache, to which a number of replies were made. I mentioned softupdate snapshots as a possible mechanism, which Sander Vesik corrected to say that it would be more like a “write through” union mount of a MFS and real filesystem.

Kip Macy pointed out that ‘tmpfs‘, on Solaris and Linux does something similar. BSD also has mfs, which requires that you allocate memory ahead of time. (Most commonly used to speed up buildwords in /usr/obj/ .)

The concept of journaling file systems that save the state of a file at given chronological points was brought up, and several people noted ‘Elephant‘. (Link from Hiten Pandya.)

Matt Dillon also wrote up several paragraphs on using RAM for storage, which are sufficiently technical that I’ll paste them in the extended link for this entry, rather then sum up.
Continue reading “Ways to use up RAM”

David P. Reese, Jr. noted that he will be at the Neal Stephenson talk in the Menlo Park Kepler’s Books on the 26th, and if there’s any other developers around, he’d like to meet up afterwards. Also, Matt Dillon noted he should throw a party when the namecache work is done.

Matt Dillon noted that if/when replacing K&R declarations with ANSI-compatible ones, watch for argument order:

(old style)
int
fubar(a, b, c)
int c;
int b;
int a;
{
}


(new style)
int
fubar(int a, int b, int c)


He also added: indent when the argument list wraps, and don’t try it in /usr/src/sys/ for the next few weeks, as he’s working there!

Also: ibotty submitted a patch that would let users mount devices to which they do not have write access, though this may be delayed until/overridden by VFS work.