Other BSDs

freebsdnews.net has a nice shout-out for this Digest and other BSD news sites – the same ones I look at. Speaking of which, Undeadly has had a whole lot of coverage of the c2k8 Hackathon lately. I haven’t been linking to it, but it’s worth some reading.

Catchup

I’ve been traveling for a few days, so it’s time you break out the bullet points again in an effort to catch up.

Matthew Dillon posted a Hammer summary and warning on the 25th, along with another update today, mostly about mirroring and very large (terabyte!) files. Michael Neumann is also adding to Hammer functionality.

He also did some initial porting work on netgraph from FreeBSD, though there’s some objections. The purpose is to make updating certain utilites easier.

This minor update to ATA support leads to a page with some interesting details about how ATA works.

FreeBSDNews.net has set up a Google calendar for FreeBSD events, though I daresay many of the events will have multiple BSDs represented.

You know how I always post about roguelike games here? The ultimate form of the roguelike has been announced.

Dru Lavigne says “Grs!“.  A bonus point to whomever figures out that reference…

Compare and contrast

Here’s some BSD and Linux comparisons that happened to come up recently:

First, NetBSD is moving to a 2-clause BSD license. Hubert Feyrer has mention of this, along with a small graph contrasting the word count of the GPL vs. the BSD license used in NetBSD, over time.

KernelTrap has a post up about a position statement from the Linux Foundation that “urge[s] vendors to adopt a policy of supporting their customers on Linux with open-source kernel code.” Compare that to the OpenBSD position on binary blobs.

Hammer talk and a paper

More conversations about Hammer capabilites has been going on, on the kernel@ mailing lists, including where Matthew Dillon describes where Hammer’s mirroring concept came from, and the possibilities of growing and shrinking filesystems. (Read to the end.) Also, he’s put up a preliminary paper describing Hammer – what it does, how to use it, and future plans. There’s a section on porting for those who might be interested.

KernelTrap’s still tracking progress, too.

(Apparently Hammer does not need to be in all caps as I’ve been writing it, going by the paper.)

Linkpile for 06/18

I have a number of links to dump:

Dru Lavigne has found that Verio is offering BSD hosting (specifically, FreeBSD). She’s also got her own recent linkpile which mentions this odd thing, plus a Federico Biancuzzi BSD interview I think I missed.

KernelTrap has a DragonFly B-Tree summary similar to mine, plus a writeup on POHMELFS benchmark, that filesystem being mentioned on this site a few days back.

“FreeBSD – the unknown Giant” has changed domains to www.freebsdnews.net.

NetMP page

Aggelos Economopoulos, who is working on making the network stack multiprocessor safe, has a page up on the DragonFly wiki describing his work. Normally I’d link to his recent conversations about this on the kernel@ mailing list, but he’s already done a nice job describing/linking it on the wiki.