Sepherosa Ziehau is planning to get rid of ipfilter. It’s one of 3 firewall-ish programs in DragonFly right now, along with ipfw and pf. Currently, pf is getting the most attention with Jan Lentfer’s porting work, though npf is also on the horizon. However, ipfilter is currently in use at nfrance.com, so its removal may be on hold until it can be shown that ipfw or pf can stand in for it. It looks like it will work out.
Here’s where the binary build is: summarized in a post to users@. So far so good…
Global tokens are now running without the giant lock in DragonFly. Neat! There’s still plenty more to remove, but this is a big step.
Sascha Wildner set most of userland to compile with the gnu99 standard (though gnu89 is still used for contrib/ and some other parts). What’s this mean? Userland code now can match the ISO C99 standard, along with the GNU extensions that go with it.
(I missed this when it actually happened. Sorry!)
James Polera found that M5 Hosting was willing to install a DragonFly server for hosting, in addition to their other BSD/Linux offerings. Their service was also apparently excellent.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master.dragonflybsd.org, is back up at a new location, with new disks and new connectivity. pkg_radd should work by default again, as should git.dragonflybsd.org.
Here’s the state of my build of pkgsrc-2010Q4 packages:
- DragonFly 2.8/i386 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.8/x86_64 – in progress
- DragonFly 2.9/i386 – just started (happens on Avalon)
- DragonFly 2.9/x86_64 – in progress
So it will be some days yet… building over 4000 packages total is never quick.
If you’re using pkgin for managing pkgsrc packages, there’s a new bugfix to cover scenarios where there’s an old and new version dependency on the same item, like php between versions 5.2 and 5.3. It’s described in French, or translated English. (Thanks, Antonio Huete)
Normally I hold this for Sunday, but I’ve got a good batch of links already. Something here for everyone, this week.
- A git cheatsheet, and another git cheatsheet. I may have linked to the latter one before, as it looks vaguely familiar. Anyway, bookmark. (Thanks, luxh on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- What should you do about bad blocks on a disk? Get a new disk.
- If you ever wanted to port software, there’s a pkgsrc developer’s guide (thanks Francois Tigeot) that shows you how.
- It’s NOT LINUX, for the billionth time. It’s BSD UNIX (certified, even) under there!
- “Children of the Cron“. An entertaining pun. (via)
- Nothing to do with BSD, or even computers, really: Gary Gorton, interviewed about the recent financial crisis, at a Fed bank website (!?). Interesting because I like economic matters, and because it’s the first web page where I’ve ever seen pop-up links added usefully, as a sort of footnote that you don’t have to scroll. (via)
- Michael Lucas recently had a machine broken into. Since everything on the machine is suspect, he’s using Netflow data to figure out when it happened, and how, which is not surprising given his most recent book. He has two posts describing how he backtracks his way to the probable source.
If you run pkgsrc-current, not the quarterly releases, the png library has just been updated to 1.5. This may break a few applications for now, and require a lot of rebuilding on your next update, since many packages depend on this.
If you are running a quarterly release of pkgsrc, you are unaffected.
avalon.dragonflybsd.org, also known as mirror-master or git.dragonflybsd.org, should be back online within a few days. Matthew Dillon has details on the upgrade.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2010Q4, is out. I’m working on the build of binary packages… It’ll be some days.
Venkatesh Srinivas wrote out a long description of what he’s doing with the removal of the Giant Lock from tmpfs. I’m pasting it here verbatim, for your enjoyment.
Yeah, so those Phoronix benchmarks are crap, but Matthew Dillon went and implemented some things that would speed up Hammer write performance in any case. Read his summary for details.
I removed the Google ad off the sidebar; it was making me enough cash to buy a sandwich on a yearly basis.
I’ve replaced it with a link to my Amazon wishlist. If you’re feeling generous, you can buy me a book! If you aren’t, you can just keep reading, and I’ll keep posting.
The default Hammer version in DragonFly is now version 5, which is the one that includes deduplication. Enjoy, bleeding-edge users! Otherwise, wait for the next release.
Version 6 is there, but don’t upgrade to it yet; there aren’t significant user-visible changes, and the usual disclaimers for new versions apply.
Sascha Wildner is continuing his huge driver-adding streak, this time with tws(4). It’s a port of the FreeBSD driver, for “LSI 3ware 9750 series SATA/SAS RAID controllers”. The commit message has a list of individual models, and further credits.
Sascha Wildner re-added burncd(8); it still works for some people. As Matthew Dillon pointed out, cdrecord is probably the better long-term bet.