Normally I’d save this for Lazy Reading, but I’m indirectly involved: the Rochester Institute of Technology now has a minor in Open Source and Free Culture. Here’s the press release. I taught one of the precursor classes, Humanitarian Free/Open Source Development (essentially open source development methods) last spring. Steve Jacobs was my advisor years ago and Remy Decausemaker was my (best) student from the HFOSS class. In any case, the courses are definitely worth it. (via)
bugs.dragonflybsd.org, the bug reporting site for DragonFly, uses Redmine. It’s been updated and now can take OpenID for your login.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
I’ve tagged version 3.6.1 of DragonFly, and built ISO/img files of it. They should be available by now on mirrors if you need them, or you can just upgrade as normal. See the linked tag commit message for what’s changed.
As I mentioned on kernel@, I’m going to roll a point release of DragonFly soon. Push in your changes if you want to get them in!
Antonio Huete put together a list of goals for the next release on the DragonFly bugtracker. Some of them are pretty ambitious, some of them are relatively easy, but they are all very useful.
Probably because of the C-state changes, Sepherosa Ziehau wants people to use a new set of sysctls instead of the hw.cpu_mwait* ones – at least on x86_64. This won’t affect you if you aren’t already familiar with them, probably.
Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.
Antonio Huete set up a DragonFly status page on status.io.
Address Space Layout Randomization, since 2010. Carsten Mattner asked, and Alex Hornung answered. (Set the sysctl vm.randomize_mmap to 1 to enable it.)
If you want to test out the latest (20131218) update to ACPICA, Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch for you. This will be good for anyone who wants to use less electricity. (updated to reflect this doesn’t enable deeper C-states as I thought it did.)
Matthew Dillon acquired one of the Acer c720 Chromebooks recently. There were changes needed for the boot process, for the keyboard, an update from FreeBSD for the ath(4) wireless (g), smbus, and trackpad… but it works now, and he detailed exactly how to get it running, and even upgrade the drive.
John Marino has moved DragonFly from binutils 2.22 to 2.24. I think this may require a full buildworld when upgrading… not sure. Anyway, binutils has a changelog if you are curious.
This post from Konrad Neuwirth asking how to do a minimal installation of DragonFly led to this list of all the ‘knobs’ you can set to make your installation smaller, from John Marino. (And your buildworld faster, if that’s appealing to you.) I also pointed at rconfig and PFI, which are criminally underdocumented.
pkg 1.2 is coming out. This brings a number of new features, but as John Marino posted, you may want to delete your old pkg.conf to keep the new version from complaining about an old config file. This upgrade is a step on the way to signed packages, which is a Good Idea.
Remember the ‘mini roadmap’, mentioned last week yesterday? John Marino put together a Google Docs spreadsheet to track the task status; several items are already cleared off. Take a look and tackle a task.
John Marino posted a possible ‘roadmap’ for DragonFly, now that we’re past the 3.6 release. The thread went on for some ways as it was discussed, including my crazy ideas. Notably, several suggested items have already been tackled – an iwn(4) upgrade has already happened, and an update to bmake, based on John’s vendor branch update instructions.
This is a little old, but Matthew Dillon noted the status of his Hammer2 work a little while ago. Some highlights: he’s intending Hammer2 to be usable on a single host by the time of the next DragonFly release (summer 2014), the Summer of Code project for compression has already been integrated, and he listed different parts of the work that may be interesting for anyone wanting to chip in.
Slightly related: Matt posted some Hammer2 comments on the DragonFly 3.6 release story on Slashdot that may be interesting. Don’t bother reading the other comments; they’ll make your eyeballs bleed.
Eitan Adler is the newest DragonFly committer; you may recognize his name from some previous commits added by others, where he synced up various work between the BSDs.
The 3.6 release of DragonFly is available now. I just put up those images last night, so if your favorite mirror doesn’t have it, give it a few hours.
For those updating from 3.4 to 3.6: there’s an ABI change, so you will have to upgrade all your packages. If you’re using pkgsrc and ready to switch to dports, now’s the time. If you already switched to dports on your 3.4 system, binary packages for 3.6 have already been built and you can use pkg to upgrade.
Also for upgrades from 3.4: You can pull the 3.6 source normally:
cd /usr/src
git fetch origin
git branch DragonFly_RELEASE_3_6 origin/DragonFly_RELEASE_3_6
git checkout DragonFly_RELEASE_3_6
But there’s a slight change needed for the 3.4 to 3.6 transition: an extra reboot in the build process:
# make buildworld && make buildkernel && make installkernel && make installworld && reboot
# make upgrade
This is all noted in /usr/src/UPDATING and in the release notes, but I’m taking no chances.