The USENIX Annual technical Conference is happening June 22-27 in Boston, Massachusetts, and registration for it has opened. Theres a whole lot of events happening, including a separate poster session, so read the link for details. (via)
I’m not technically qualified to answer the question Josh Triplett asked in comments on my ‘dolt’ article:
If you want to fix that, feel free to send me a patch, or just tell me that DragonFly uses the same -fPIC -DPIC that Linux and FreeBSD use.
Tell him at/send patch to josh@freedesktop.org, and if you do, thank you for helping.
BSDCan 2008 is in mid-May, and the schedule is posted. Make your travel plans soon if you plan to go!
This article, titled “Myths Open Source Developers Tell Ourselves“, dates back to 2003, but is surprisingly accurate. I suspect these myths will become even more prevalent; the number of open source projects out there has been increasing year after year, or at least that’s my impression. (Is there any person or organization that’s trying to track the number?) My favorite myth in the article: “End Users Love Tracking CVS”.
Libtool is a very flexible but relatively slow tool used for a lot of software; it can impose a signicant time penalty during compilation. This post to debian-devel@debian.org names a new tool, dolt, which works as a drop-in replacement for libtool can significantly reduce build time. It’s not (yet) supported on DragonFly. The name comes from “do ltcompile”. (from Hasso on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Murray Stokely mentioned the new ‘gold‘ linker for GCC in a blog post. It’s going into binutils, and apparently would provide a nice speedup for linking C++ code. This won’t help so much with (most of) a buildworld on DragonFly, but it would definitely help for KDE or other large third-party applications. (via) No, I don’t know why it’s called ‘gold’.
A new one of these crops up every months or so: a reference list of common Unix commands. (Via)
Also, found with random Google search: BSD and Linux Filesystem Attributes.
A different way of looking at the open source projects involved in Google’s Summer of Code project this year: grouped by category. It’s interesting to see groupings like ‘Games’ or ‘Bioinformatics’.
BSDTalk 146 is out, with James Cornell interviewed in a 20-minute podcast. The host, Will Backman, asks “What are your favorite BSD-related websites?”, and “Where can you buy BSD on disk?” Leave a comment on his site if you’ve got an answer.
Nirmal Thacker happened to post his Google Summer of Code proposal (pdf) for an Anticipatory I/O scheduler to the kernel@ mailing list, along with a request for feedback. We have 27 other proposals at this point.
Matthew Dillon, upon finding there wasn’t a way to queue traffic ‘fairly’ with pf/altq, wrote a ‘fair queue’ patch. Give it a try if you are using pf on DragonFly as a router.
Matthew Dillon asks, “How can pf be used to create a fair-queue algorithm similar to Cisco’s?” Answer if you know it; there’s been a few guesses.
The newest BSDTalk has an interview with Adam Wright of No Starch Press, who published among other things the excellent “Absolute FreeBSD” and a lot of books about Legos.
dragonflybsd.org is on a DSL line temporarily as the network connection is shifted; however, there’s a colocated server being added soon, and pkgbox has been upgraded to newer hardware.
Matthew Dillon has turned net.inet.tcp.always_keepalive on by default, due in part to problems seen during the most recent pkgsrc bulk build I’ve been doing on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org.
Student proposals for the Google Summer of Code are now due on April 7th, instead of today. This means more time to refine proposals, or create a new one. Get to it! We have 28 applications at this point.
And look: Google’s newest product to launch on April 1st: Google Gulp.
Abstracts for paper presentations at EuroBSDCon 2008 are due June 1st. The EuroBSDCon site doesn’t have the Call For Papers on it, so I’ll link to the mail.
I like this note from the family page: “Derivative work such as Gentoo are considered welcome though their creativity is restrictively licensed.” (Emphasis added)
Matthew Dillon reports that HAMMER is running well enough to have survived a week holding backups on his local LAN; he asks for more testers.
The March issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out. There’s a timely article in there where Murraay Stokely describes the benefits for FreeBSD that came from Summer of Code participation. (via Dru Lavigne)
(remember, student apps are due by Monday!)Â
Matthew Dillon posted another HAMMER filesystem update. In this one, he goes into the current state and talks about a bit of what’s planned for this filesystem (boot support – yay!). He later went into details of historical filesystem access and snapshot usage.
An interesting point from a recent commit: a HAMMER filesystem is stable enough to use as /usr/obj during a buildworld.