BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.
You have probably seen reports declaring the demise of OpenSolaris by now, many taking a less than conservative approach in reporting the news one way or the other. So what do you make of the news? By all accounts, the source code (including future changes) for things such as ZFS will continue to be published under the CDDL. Will Oracle closing up development make it impossible for operating systems like FreeBSD to maintain ZFS without forking it? What do you think the ramifications will be for DragonFly’s HAMMER and DragonFly in general?
DSCHED_FQ was added to GENERIC, making it the default disk scheduling policy for master. You might want to refresh your memory of dsched and the fairq policy with some prior details and benchmarks.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out in the comments, adding DSCHED_FQ to GENERIC does not make it the default, but you no longer have to load the fairq module. Which raises the question, should fairq be the default?
The libevent library has been removed from the repository to ease the maintenance burden. There is some additional rationale in this tracker issue.
Matthew Dillon’s updated his iphdr branch of DragonFly, and he’s looking for testers. In this version, IP headers aren’t switched to host byte order, reducing complexity. If you like transmitting data, this would be a good one to test.
I almost had an all-acronym title, darnit.
- Theodore T’so’s writing about SSDs. It’s Linuxish, so not all the problems he finds would apply to DragonFly, but interesting in the detail level.
- The WordPress Theme Fiasco. (via) I link just so I can say that BSD licensing certainly takes away some of these headaches.
- How to get Vim to highlight HACK the same as XXX.
- How many books are there in the world? (via) I find this strangely interesting, probably cause I like books.
- 10 Great Unix Tools (via).
- The oldest web page, via Prof. Dr. Style, also a good read. I still reflexively assume web links that contain a ~ must be more authentic and personal than any other. (via).
Jan Lentfer’s looking for code review; specifically these patches. It’s for pfsync and carp, part of his recent pf upgrade.
Dru Lavigne has listed conventions she’ll be at over the next few months, so if you feel like taking a BSDA exam or just plain helping out at a BSD booth, check the list.
Stathis Kamperis was looking for a way to list all disk devices and the associated serial numbers. Matthew Dillon described a manual way to find it. That manual method could be turned into a single shell script, if anyone wanted a small shell programming task.
Samuel Greear has even more benchmarks for his kqueue work. This time, he took an example server from Unix Network Programming, and tested various permutations. His post has the relative timings for each server type.
Some links! I normally would save this for a Lazy Reading Sunday entry, but I want to clear the backlog:
- 10 vi tips and tricks. (via)
- Pomodoro Technique, a way of breaking work into half-hour chunks to keep yourself productive. (via)
- More unusual Git tips. (via)
- 10 Differences Between Linux and BSD. Not that exciting, but I like the anecdote in item 4.
The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the theme of “Interdisciplinary Lessons”. September’s theme will be “Keystone Companies” and October will be “Sales Strategy”. If you want to contribute to those issues, articles are due by the 15th of the month before.
Matthew Dillon created a new Features page on the DragonFly site; it lists the technologies added to DragonFly from over the past few years.
Dru Lavigne’s started a PC-BSD Blog. This is great news – I don’t tend to cover other BSDs because I think there’s enough space in the blogosphere to others to do it. (and I only have so many hours in a day.) Dru’s already shown she knows posting, so I’m very happy to see more specific BSD outlets.
AboutBSD.net is putting source attribution on stories now, so I have nothing to complain about.
Well, I suppose I could complain about the default margins on embedded story images. It’s too small. Yes, I’m really reaching.
The logs from regular DragonFly builds are now available as they are completed. It’s i386 right now, with x86_64 on the way.
Jan Lentfer posted about his progress on upgrading pf. He has pickups working, but on on a per-rule basis; he’s looking for feedback on how important this option is for other users.
Dru Lavigne linked to AboutBSD.net; it’s an aggregate site that compiles the RSS feeds from a number of BSD sites.
It doesn’t list any news from this site. I had a conversation with “Psyber.Monkey”, the maintainer some months ago and I pointed out that since it was copying posts wholesale, it sounded like I was writing for that website instead of my own, and it didn’t note the source, or even keep my name with my work. He said he’d address that and remove my copied posts until it was fixed. It looks like it hasn’t been addressed.
The BSD license (for example) allows for copying work, but it doesn’t allow you to strip the author’s name off the work. The AboutBSD.net articles at least link back to the original articles now, but I’d like to see more specific attribution, as is done at other places that quote people’s work, like KernelTrap or even (usually) Slashdot.
I don’t want to sound too cranky about it, as he did reach out and check, which is a first – normally I just see my writing surface on aggregate feed sites, and that’s the earliest I hear of it.
Update: I take it back.
Is it time to move to GPT instead of the traditional fdisk/disklabel combo? Petr thinks so. There’s some work to do, though.