Not news, but a succinct description of DragonFly’s scheduler. Bits of what’s described there have shown up in news posts here, but I think this is the first full description.
Damian Vicino wrote up his experience presenting DragonFly at JRSL 2008; it apparently was lightly attended because of another big event, but the DragonFly presentation was interesting enough they ran long and had to keep answering questions even after the next presentation started. (previously mentioned here)
As part of a larger discussion about transactional file systems, Dmitri Nikulin posted a link to two relatively recent blog posts by Jeff Robinson talking about I/O atomicity and file offset semantics.
For those readers who use vi or vim or another vi-like editor, here’s an interesting writeup of how to make vim really work for you. Emacs users, please look away. (via someone on IRC)
5 years of this Digest, with around 3,000 posts, starting from the first in 2003. Why isn’t there more like this, more frequently, in the BSD world?
KernelTrap has a nice article up covering Daniel Phillips’ description of the Tux3 file system structure, which will be interesting to anyone who followed the previous file system discussion between Phillips and Matthew Dillon.
I’m not sure if I’ve linked to this before, so anyway: Robert Luciani linked to a nice image explaining how threads work in DragonFly, translating from pthread to LWP to LWKT.
MeetBSD 2008 is happening November 15th and 16th, at the Googleplex. This one coincides with the 15th anniversary of FreeBSD, too. Check the Speakers page for details on what’s happening.
As Dru Lavigne noted a few days ago, the August issue of the Open Source Business Resource, focusing on Education, is now available.
The second issue of BSD Magazine is out, though the details aren’t up on the magazine’s site as of this writing – freebsdnews.net has the cover and contents. This issue gets into OpenBSD. (via)
The latest BSDTalk (actually from August 18th – I’m still catching up) has Isaac Levy and Steven Kreuzer talking about NYCBSDCon 2008, coming up October 11-12. It’s 15 minutes total.
Dru Lavigne has posted another set of BSD links, and something I wouldn’t expect: a video presentation (Youtube) of the table of contents to the July Open Source Business Resource.
Max Lindner posted a status update and a detailed followup on his Summer of Code project, dma(8). Matthias Schmidt asked for more DMA testing; it’s worth trying if you don’t care for Sendmail.
Matthew Dillon has posted an update for the 9th on the state of Hammer. The next big question: should the Hammer code for porter be stored in Subversion or Git?
Also: Nothing earth shattering, but this post on users@ has some details on Hammer usage and how it works with large files and with backups in general.
Antonio Huete Jimenez has created a DragonFly Facebook group; join up, if you’re a Facebook user.
(Update: fixed the accidentally Anglicized name – sorry!)
Louisa Luciani has put up a website for her Google Summer of Code LiveDVD project. (Work history is also available.)
Caveat: I don’t know if it’s done yet, as the work period for GSoC projects is not quite over.
Today is one of those dates that’s fun to type. Anyway!
- KernelTrap has a summarization of the recent Tux3/Hammer discussion between Matthew Dillon and Daniel Phillips. Read for the summary, stay for the mind-boggling filesystem design detail.
- Philip Paeps has a note on his blog on how to use one-time passwords, good for when you are traveling and know you won’t be connecting from secure locations. He does it on FreeBSD, but it works on DragonFly too. (update: site seems to be down. Darn. Look at opiepasswd(1) in the meantime.)
- This article titled “Copyright, Fraud and Window Taxes (No, not that Windows)” talks about how people generally don’t mind copying; what makes them mad is attribution. e.g. Someone copying your works doesn’t bother people unless the copier claims the work is his or her own. This is not an unfamiliar concept, folks. (via)
There’s something there being updated, though it just has the old icon and what looks like a default PHPNuke-ish interface. Hopefully some authorial voice will arise.
As part of a larger discussion about PXE booting, Pedro F. Giffuni pointed at a Google Summer of Code project for FreeBSD, titled “http support for PXE“. This would be very convenient.
Matthew Dillon’s latest Hammer update, among other things, brings news of a Hammer mailing list specifically for people working on porting Hammer to other systems.