Welcome DragonFly’s newest developer with commit access: Antonio Huete Jimenez, also known as ‘tuxillo’ on EFNet #dragonflybsd via IRC.
Jon Birrell, a contributor to a number of BSD projects (primarily FreeBSD), has died. His friend and coworker Craig Rodrigues has posted a notice about his death, along with some memories. It’s always awful when someone dies, but it always strikes me about how when an open source contributor dies, it’s noticed, quietly, worldwide.
YONETANI Tomokazu wrote up a nice bit of explanation about compiling src and pkgsrc as non-root. He even explicitly names some useful variables to set.
Several people have been working on having DragonFly compile with clang. Alex Hornung’s updated the clang page on the DragonFly site for details; if this interests you, a conversation on EFNet #dragonflybsd may be in order.
Linkbloggy, briefly:
- A view of Bell Labs, where that other Unix flavor came from, in the 1960s. (via) Best sideburns ever.
- IRC, as explained by American prime time television. (YouToooob, via) Remember, #dragonflybsd is available on EFNet.
- Stallman, Torvalds, and Knuth walk into a bar… (via)
This blog post from Peteris Krumins lists all the publicly available Introduction to Algorithms lectures from MIT, and links to his summary for each, so you can find out what it’s like before investing in over an hour of lecture. Very specific but very valuable stuff.
Matthew Dillon is making some changes to sockets; these should make the code significantly more simple. Look at the first patch, for instance.
Jan Lentfer has put together a test upgrade of BIND in the base system from 9.3 to 9.5.2. Give it a test run, especially if you are on 64-bit DragonFly.
Saifi Khan asked some questions about using git; I link to two sets of answers, because these little things are useful when you are starting with git. Or, in my case, don’t use it frequently enough to remember.
OpenBSD developer Jacek Masiulaniec gets 14 minutes of airtime in the most recent BSDTalk podcast.
Saifi Khan ran Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s make parallelism test on a dual-cpu system, and the theory holds up: ‘make -j N’ where N == the number of CPUs, plus 1, will give the fastest build time. (graphed again!)
Do you have a SMP system, running DragonFly 2.5? Stathis Kamperis needs you to test something, to see if another set of system calls can be made multiprocessor-safe.
Update: An additional step.
The first one of the Open Source Business Resource Co-Creation issues is out. Read this if any of the open source software you use has a commercial component. (Chances are, yes, it does.)
BSDTalk 178 is all about Evil! Well, Internet evil. It’s an hour-plus-long conversation wtih Richard Clayton at EuroBSDCon about phishing, spamming, and other things that didn’t have a name a few decades ago.
Hubert Feyrer posted a note about time zones, describing how to find what’s defined on a system (all his steps work on DragonFly) and tricks to set it locally. Along the same lines is this “A literary appreciation of the Olson/Zoneinfo/tz database” that talks about all the historical details. (via) Of course, I have to mention Sascha Wildner, who has been carefully keeping DragonFly’s time zone data up to date for quite a while.
Update: and again!
Jan Lentfer repeated his Postgres tests on DragonFly with some system changes suggested by Matthew Dillon, and noticed a speed increase. (See previous report.)
It’s possible to speed up a ‘make buildworld’ by increasing the number of parallel make processes, with the -j option. However, the optimal number of make processes depends on your system setup. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert did some testing, and it looks like the number of CPUs +1 is the best option – as long as you have more than 1 CPU. His writeup even includes a nice graph.
Nuno Antunes has a compact writeup of what it would take to finish porting netgraph7 to DragonFly, if you’re interested…
A bunch of small things to catch up on:
- vim-fugitive: a vim addon that seems to allow git manipulation from within Vim. (via)
- xkcd book 0 is out, for those who like math cartoons. (history cartoons is what gets me.)
- Webfwlog is a firewall log analyzer for various firewall products. It ought to work on DragonFly, too. (via)
Stathis Kamperis has written up a description of the test framework he designed during the Summer of Code. It may end up in DragonFly, which seems like a good idea to me. It’s designed to be generally operating-system independent. He includes a link to the git repo where he’s keeping it now.