I’ve linked to explanations like this before, but it’s worth repeating: when Tim Darby had a crash, Matthew Dillon explained how to obtain a dump. This can be fantastically useful when debugging a crash.
pkg_dry, the binary package management tool I keep nattering on about, has had its name changed to ‘pkgin‘. I have no idea how to pronounce it.
If you’ve already tried pkg_dry, this will require rebuilding the databases because of the name change.
The newest BSDTalk has a conversation from BSDCan 2009 with 5 different FreeBSD core team members, for 38 minutes.
I always forget how to do this, so I’m linking to an article about it: Tunneling and Proxies over SSH. There’s a cutesy title and intro, which can be safely ignored. (via)
Also, some tips for taking full advantage of Git. (via)
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert tagged 2.3.1, which is still in the development branch, so don’t update unless you were already at 2.3. There’s a nice list of commits that went into this tag.
“FreeBSD – the unknown Giant” has beaten me to the post I was intending to make, noting that there’s 4 different BSD releases this week, all of varying sizes, and showing a lot of vigor in the BSD community.
Dru Lavigne has linked to the latest issue of the Open Source Business Resource, with a focus on open source in government. The next issue will be “women in open source” (appropriate given recent hullabaloo) – they’re looking for submissions.
Also, Dru made a good point in a separate post, that is connected with the recent kqemu work for DragonFly: if every BSD had a working kqemu kernel module, it would make life easier for people taking the BSDA exam.
I had mentioned the new malloc in DragonFly before, but Matthew Dillon has a nice explanation of its performance improvements and the relationship to the existing slab allocator.
Colin Adams has a DragonFly system up and running, and he’s posting about dragonflies – the insect variety.
The 2.2.1 release is on its way out to mirrors now. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has kindly put together a list of the changes in this new version.
Sdävtaker posted a note about BSDDay, a BSD convention happening in Argentina, on the 29th and 30th of May. There’s also a poster. (PDF)
NetBSD now has a Projects Blog and a Twitter account. I’m not taking credit for the idea, but I do note a definite similarity between that and the DragonFly Digest, to which I say: quick, someone do this for FreeBSD and/or OpenBSD! More attention to all the BSD work being done is positive.
Hasso Tepper spotted a tty problem that caused a panic in kdesu; Matthew Dillon committed a fix which means the release is delayed until tomorrow. (Thanks, Lazarus, for catching it first)
Make Hasso Tepper’s life a bit easier and take heed of this list: Maintaining stuff in pkgsrc.
Edit: Meant to publish this a bit ago; missed it. Sorry!
The 2.2.1 release of DragonFly, rounding up changes since the release (I don’t have a list), should be tomorrow.
Naoya Sugioka has kqemu working with the intended performance improvements; please test if you use qemu. (Johannes Hofmann has done some initial tests.)
Hasso Tepper has lang/gcc3 working in DragonFly 2.3, which means that we could potentially drop the version of gcc3 in contrib/ after the 2.4 release. He asks for other testers, please.
This would have the nice side effect of speeding up buildworld tremendously, as gcc3 and gcc4 get rebuilt each time.
- Thanks to Stathis Kamperis, it is now possible to build DragonFly 2.2 on a DragonFly 2.3 system, if for some reason you need to move to a system from before the recent libc changes.
- Matthew Dillon has replaced the existing BSD malloc with a port of the slab allocator, which makes malloc() faster, with minor benefits for a buildworld.
- Matthew Dillon also has a patch for people wanting to look for the elusive ‘file-missing-in-directory-listing’ Hammer bug. Caveat Emptor.
Murray Stokely very kindly passed me a link to his summary of the 8 videos now online showing presentations from the recent 2009 DCBSDCon.
Of particular interest is Robert Luciani’s talk about M:N threading in DragonFly. Yes, that’s the same Robert Luciani who is participating in Summer of Code with DragonFly to profile kernel contention on multiprocessor systems.
There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.
Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott
Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon
Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear
Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon
Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper