It’s been 0.25 years since the last, so pkgsrc is due for another quarterly release. The usually-two-week freeze before release starts tonight. The release should happen at the end of the month.
Naoya Sugioka posted his qemu config; I link to it for reference, both for running DragonFly in emulation and for running emulated systems on DragonFly.
Jan Lentfer’s posted details on how his update of pf is going; it builds, but he’s having some issues with that actual filtering. He’s on vacation for a short while, but his git repo of that work is available for anyone who wants to look.
- IBM’s developerWorks has an article up about GNU screen. It’s not BSD-specific, but the tips in using screen are useful. (Before someone brings it up: yes, tmux too.)
- Another article talks about inspecting network traffic using various tools including tcpdump and wireshark. It is a tremendous advantage to see what happens on a network at the most basic level, so this is a good skill to pick up.
- Oh, and “Setting up UNIX file systems” and “10 steps to Unix nirvana“.
- FreeBSD now ships with clang. (via) I know DragonFly (mostly?) works with clang… Could we switch?
- “hwstat” will gain DragonFly support soon.
- Firmware for ral(4) has been added by Joe Talbott.
- Thomas Klausner has a writeup of some project ideas or goals taken from the recent pkgsrcCon. A followup has me thinking: if the -uu option updates dependent packages with pkg_add, does that mean ‘pkg_radd -uu packagename” will do all updating possible based on available binary packages? Worth trying.
Venkatesh is a new committer, and he’s already helping out with the MPSAFE work.
Matthew Dillon’s outlined the exact steps for converting to coarse locking, and he’s looking for volunteers to convert files, according to the guidelines he described. If you’re looking for maybe two hours of work that would make a big difference, here’s your chance.
BSDTalk has a very timely interview with Roman Divácký and Ed Schouten about the switch to clang/LLVM in FreeBSD. It’s 17 minutes, recorded at the recent BSDCan 2010.
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
There’s an interesting article about mandoc and mdocml up on undeadly.org, talking about its history and usage in OpenBSD. It’s present in DragonFly, though it hasn’t been set to replace anything (i.e. groff), yet, that I know of. I do like the mdocml HTML output, and I’d like to see it here.
I found this reference list of targets for bmake very useful, especially because I can never remember them all. Unfortunately, the site where it’s located appears to be going away at the end of the month, but it should resurface on a new NetBSD wiki.
BSDTalk 190 has 20 minutes of conversation with Michael Lucas, one of my favorite authors, about his new book, “Network Flow Analysis“. He is also responsible for other BSD books.
The latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, and it has a number of articles about growth and open source. It’s a mix of “how-to” and “how-we-did” articles.
www.dragonflybsd.org runs using ikiwiki, which I just updated to the latest version. Everything looks OK, but tell me if I’m wrong.
Yay, acronyms! GSoC student David Shao has an extensive page up describing the state of his work so far.
It’s a holiday weekend, at least in the United States, so I’m posting few things that take time to view.
Murray Stokely mentioned this in a comment, but it’s juicy enough to warrant a post: the BSD Conferences channel on YouTube has all 17 of the recent AsiaBSDCon 2010 presentations, plus a lot more from other conferences.
Phil Foglio, the fellow who drew the original BSD Daemon, has several comics strips, all of which are available for free – Buck Godot (complete), MythAdventures (in progress), What’s New with Phil and Dixie (in progress), and Girl Genius (in progress and in print).
I had a sudden buildup of things to link to. It’s three items, but there’s enough info here to eat a few hours…
- Flash Destroyer: (destroying hardware, not like what Apple’s trying) found via the howling void, which of course has lots of complaints about technical inaccuracy. Still, interesting to contrast this with swapcache usage. The Bus Pirate on that site also sounds interesting.
- Handling multiple SSH keys in your SSH config: talks about one issue that came out of a larger IBM developerWorks UNIX tips article which is part of a larger series. I may have linked to parts of it before; it’s firmly packed with usefulness. Seriously, go read.
- Dru Lavigne linked to this article about the future of software development, and I agree with her: it’s a good prediction of the very near future.
Some recent bugs motivated Matthew Dillon to change DragonFly’s network stack. It’s a pretty radical simplification, so things like IPv6, ICMP, pf, etc. will need to be tested. There’s already a first round of changes to try out, served in Git.
Matthew Dillon’s been running swapcache on an Intel X-25 SSD on a very busy (in terms of disk) machine for some months now. Over a long period, the disk activity will wear down the SSD, but it’s important to see if swapcache makes a significant difference with extended use. Do you have to trade disk life for speedy I/O? He reports the results in a recent email.
Dylan Reinhold has contributed a HOWTO document on setting up swapcache. Thanks, Dylan!