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
Bad: having the system used for mirroring DragonFly crash a lot.
Sdävtaker came up with a potential idea for encrypting backup files, and Matthew Dillon followed up with another way that uses Hammer.
There’s a new tool being put together for pkgsrc installation and management, called pkg_dry. There’s an initial version for download with instructions from its creator, Emile “iMil” Heitor. It looks to duplicate the functionality of apt-get or yum, by handling binary-only remote package management.
Someone please test this on DragonFly, though not on a production machine… If it does end up matching apt-get (the only thing I like in Debian) in terms of functionality, that will be fantastic! I have wanted something like this for a while.
Antonio Huete Jimenez reports that DragonFly now can install and run without issue on VirtualBox 2.2.0; it had been unable to work in previous releases.
Hasso Tepper reported on the results of Peter Avalos’s major libc changes; someone retiring libc_r would help, as would someone figuring out why unistd.h isn’t found on DragonFly.
Naoya Sugioka has some preliminary patches for kqemu on DragonFly. In testing, he found it made qemu run slower, which is the opposite of its purpose, so he’d appreciate suggestions.
Can someone who uses git more heavily than I do look at Tig, a git viewer, and mention if it is useful? It looks interesting, as one of the features that git ‘lacks’ is a visual client other than at the command line.
I’m going to mesh together two unrelated items in this post:
The April OSBR is out, with this issue being a focus on Open APIs.
The newest @Play column covers winners of the 7DRL, or “7 Day Roguelike” contest, where contestants build a new roguelike game in a week. There are some real oddities, like Decimation. I’m not sure how many of these will build on DragonFly, darnit.
This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues. Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly. Another side of his story has come to light. He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.
It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.
Please welcome our newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Stathis Kamperis
Peter Avalos has a large number of changes to libc in his tree. He’d like to have other eyeballs looking at them, so please read over and comment.