John Marino’s work on getting support for DragonFly ‘natively’ into binutils, upstream, has been successful. Thanks, John!
I’ve found enough good links I’m able to schedule this post ahead of time. Yay!
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author, is selling a short story via Amazon/Kindle. It has nothing to do with BSD, directly.
- Also, he offers beer to anyone who can get KVM working on a BSD. Any BSD. I guess vkernels don’t count, really.
- This idea came up at work recently: Etherkiller!
- The evolution of computer displays. (via) It covers some pretty ancient stuff – the article doesn’t even get to Pong until page 3.
- A paper on the new PBI format for PC-BSD (PDF). This is being presented at AsiaBSDCon.
- The Dancing Poultry License (via ftigeot on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A chart of the evolution of science fiction. (via) There’s some good titles in there, if you can read it.
As already mentioned on this Digest, the freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2011Q1, has started. I’ve also completed several bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 and pkgsrc-current using DragonFly system with GCC 4.4. Francois Tigeot has very kindly gone out of his way to get some of the (relatively few) broken packages listed in those builds to be fixed.
As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow. If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.
There’s a DragonFly BSD group on identi.ca, the not-as-creepy-as-Facebook social site.
APIC support has been updated, so not only will some machines work better/at all with a multiprocessor kernel, more machines will boot. Not only that, but Sepherosa Ziehau has a newer version of ACPI and interrupt routing available. This is wonderful news! We’ve needed this update for some time.
My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available. Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change. I’m starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.
For the curious, or for those who plan ahead, I posted what’s on the Google Summer of Code student application for DragonFly.
If you were thinking of working on a disk scheduler for DragonFly, this is your lucky day! Brills Peng asked for some overall guidance on how to start on a Summer of Code project. I threw out some general tips, Alex Hornung talked up resources on kernel programming, and Venkatesh Srinivas described exactly what you’d need to write a disk scheduler. There’s about 50% of a whole proposal, prewritten.
We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year! (yay!)
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
If you want to mentor, apply here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.) I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. Signing up to mentor does not mean you must mentor if there aren’t any projects that interest you; it does mean you need to review applications and provide feedback for students March 28th – April 8th.
If you want to be a student with DragonFly:
Check the projects page for ideas:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/
… or come up with your own.
Get your application together by March 28th. Start talking about it on the mailing list or IRC or however as soon as you can; there’s a direct relationship between the amount of preparation we see beforehand and people getting accepted.
Here’s the timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline
Copied from my email to users@/kernel@, cause it has everything you need.
The newest BSDTalk has a roughly 15-minute talk with Dan Langille about the upcoming 2011 BSDCan and PGCon events.
Samuel Greear has been working on a module to translate Hammer snapshots into Windows-style shadow copies, so a Hammer volume’s snapshots would be accessible when shared to a Windows machine, or anything that understood shadow copies, so Samba.
He’s put up his work so far; it’s not finished, but he has schoolwork to get to and wants to make it available for anyone who wants to run with it. (say, for Summer of Code…) Apparently the macros in the shadow_copy2 or onefs modules are similar to what a Hammer module would need…
A new page has popped up on the DragonFly website: How to Port to DragonFly. The work is very thorough, and the author is ‘srussell’, which I think is Stéphane Russell? Thanks, person who I may be misidentifying!
Edit: corrected name spelling
Nice big pile of links this week. Enjoy the reading, especially if you’re still recovering from St. Patrick’s Day festivities. (does that happen outside of the U.S.?)
- I like this “Insufficiently known POSIX shell features” item, because too many of the shell tutorials out there assume you have bash. (via)
- The decline and fall of disk storage prices, summarizing this. Oh, I hope this trend continues. (via)
- Michael Lucas’s disaster and recovery with OpenBSD.
- Sometimes the Internet produces things I can’t ever have thought would exist. Loom-weaved reproductions of Apple 2 game loading screens, complete with crack notice. The image linked is Castle Smurfenstein. (via)
- I had no idea how much DNS prefetching could affect the network. (via)
- Saved Google searches for DragonFly sometimes turn up things I didn’t know about. For example, it appears DragonFly is regularly tested in FFmpeg builds. That’s great! I mentally expect to be left out.
- Open source work == more job opportunities. (via) This is absolutely true, and not just talking about Web 2.0 style companies. I recently hired a junior admin at my workplace. I went through I think 80 resumes and a pile of phone and in-person interviews; if even one of them had listed open-source work, they would have moved to the front of the line – just because it meant they did more.
- PGCon 2011 is coming up, for Postgres users – conveniently right after BSDCan 2011, and in the same location, which is because Dan Langille is working on both.
- Remember how XFCE only supports udev on Linux and nothing else, because it’s too hard to follow the conflicting and changing plans on Linux device support? There’s larger messes. (via this and that) I would suggest that when an organization says “There’s a problem here and that’s the way this works” instead of “There’s a problem; let’s adapt and fix” is a sign of stagnation.
Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wish I knew more about kqueue!” Well, here’s a link (PDF) from Vlad GALU that can help with that.
dragonflybsd.org is down right now, so if you’re looking for the Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly, I have a local mirror of that page.
Update: dragonflybsd.org is back up, but I’ll keep that mirror there just in case…
The GIF format, or rather the LZW format it uses, is no longer patent-encumbered. (GIF patent worries led to the creation of the PNG format, if I’m not mistaken) Matthias Drochner has changed pkgsrc to use giflib instead of libungif.
According to Wikipedia, the patent expired more than 5 years ago, so this isn’t really news other than some packages need to be rebuilt. Still, memories of the general Internet Outrage from a decade ago are interesting compared to the events of today.
Venkatesh Srinivas performed the fefe.de ‘scalability’ benchmarks, which have been mentioned here before. He performed it on different hardware and only with DragonFly, so it’s not really for comparison but rather for analysis. However: graphs!
Matthew Dillon added some system tunables to match these microbenchmarks, and then changed the values. The benchmarks looked better, but according to him you wouldn’t want to run a system normally with those values.
Did you know that Euraeka, a news search site, runs on DragonFly? I did not. Now we both do!