The FreeBSD Foundation is auctioning the first copy of the second edition of Michael Lucas’s “Absolute FreeBSD“. While you may not want to participate in the auction, I’ve read the first edition, and it’s a very enjoyable book.
The donations page will be cleaned out soon – please mention on kernel@ any DragonFly-related needs you have.
Antonio Huete used sysbench to benchmark a DragonFly system running either libc_r or libthread_xu. Aggelos Economopoulos graphed the results so far.
Huete mentions that more results are forthcoming on more operating systems (same hardware), and they’ll be found here:
Man, BSDTalk’s been on a roll lately. There’s a 7-minute update on OpenCon 2007 with Marc Balmer, in BSDTalk 133.
In a conversation about porting Bluetooth support from another BSD, Hasso Tepper posted his summary of the state of the stacks in FreeBSD and NetBSD.
I link to this recent IPv6 bug report for DragonFly not because it’s a spectacular problem, but because it’s one of the most well-researched bug reports (including a fix!) that I’ve seen in a while. The originating issue is fixed, now.
There’s more details on Matthew Dillon’s HAMMER file system, specifically detailing B-Tree usage.
BSDTalk 132 is with the man on the other side of the fence: Richard Stallman.
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring BSDphone! Wired has a writeup on various smartphones that let you actually install software on the hardware you own, unlike some well-known examples. One of the phones mentioned is the Motorola A1200, or “Ming”, which is possibly BSD licensed open source code. Most of the pages that talk about it say “Linux-based”, so it may just be the translations, which are the only place I’ve seen BSD licensing mentioned so far.
Update: Poop. It’s just the translations. The operating system itself is a Linux 2.4 kernel.
The (student) Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois is holding their annual Reflections/Projections conference this weekend. It has the usual technical presentations about 3D rendering, system automation, and the like. However, it also has a good amount of BSD content. There’s an executive from Wind River Systems, which has had some history with FreeBSD, an OpenBSD presentation, and two cartoonists – Randall Munroe, of xkcd fame, and Phil & Kaja Foglio who create, among other things, Girl Genius. Phil Foglio happens to be the original artist who drew the BSD daemon.
Matthew Dillon is starting to commit parts of his HAMMER file system work; he anticipates it being available in beta form by the 2.0 release at the end of this year. He posted a design document, describing how it should work. Some highlights from my reading of it:
- Maximum size: half an exabyte
- Infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy
- Streaming backups
- Asynchronous transactional support – no long fscks to check disk state
(Someone correct me if I’m summarizing inaccurately.) Some details from the ensuing discussion include comparisons with ZFS, RAID, and backups. KernelTrap also has a nice summary.
‘walt’ asked about the benefits of a tickless system. It would have some effect on system efficiency, and Constantine A. Murenin found it could make a measurable difference in power consumption
Welcome our newest committer: Thomas Nikolajsen.
A conversation about encrypted filesystems turned up some links on the topic from Chris Turner.
The next AsiaBSDCon will be in Tokyo, in March 2008. If you want to present a paper, the abstract is due on December 1st.
There is apparently a new version of Skype available that is expressly designed to run under Solaris/FreeBSD (download the static version) using Linux emulation. This may work on DragonFly, if it doesn’t require emulation of a Linux 2/6 kernel. (Thanks, Yair K.)
The latest FreeBSD status report notes that the Google Summer of Code project to port OpenBSD’s sensor framework to FreeBSD is successful, and also that it made it into DragonFly before it even came to FreeBSD. (via trevorjk on #dragonflybsd)
Unfortunately, I don’t have a web archive of this to point at, but Chris Pressey just posted a patch to the long-dormant BSD Installer mailing list that updates the installer to work with Lua 5.1.2. It previously only worked with 5.0.x versions. (Thanks, Chris Buechler, for the link!)
‘walt’ has some tips on how to get at least a relatively recent version of Java running on DragonFly. We really need an update of the Linux emulator, as that’s what keeps this and some other things from working.
Traditionally, in BSD-land, MFC means ‘merge from current’, bringing code changes from the bleeding edge back to a recent release. Apparently, it’s a bizarre mashup of the fast food chains McDonalds and KFC in China.