A hard disk in crater.dragonflybsd.org, where the repo for DragonFly source is located, died last night. The disk has been replaced, and the files should all be back in place later today. Double-check if you committed something in the last 24 hours and make sure it’s there, just to be safe.
If you were looking for something to do, Samuel J. Greear has invested some time in cleaning up the various project idea pages out there, and has links to prove it.
Did you know Fred is the name for the DragonFly mascot? Well, you do now. He’s also back in the bootloader, thanks to Joe Talbott.
I mentioned previously that Postgres 9 is already in pkgsrc, but the flip side of that is both Postgres 8.2, and MySQL 4 are being removed. If you still have these installed, be ready to migrate at your next upgrade.
Oh, and you can switch to clang for building pkgsrc, too.
It looks like 2.8 will be showing up in a few weeks – mid-October. If things go well, we’ll have prebuilt pkgsrc-2010Q3 binaries to go with it.
Venkatesh Srinivas (whee!) has written up a lengthy post about his idlezero work. It provides a nice peek into recent work, and how parts of DragonFly work. I’d normally save it for a Lazy Reading entry, but I don’t want to wait that long. It should hopefully show up on the dragonflybsd.org site too.
Starting September 23rd, pkgsrc will freeze (i.e. bugfixes only) in preparation for the 2010Q3 release, which is planned for one week later, instead of the usual 2 weeks. This release will include some very new software like Postgres 9, too.
Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.
BSDTalk has another new episode, (197… almost at the 2-century mark!), and it has 37 minutes of conversation with M. Warner Losh about FreeNAS.
Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip. It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list. It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.
‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager. The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.
The BSD Show! (am I supposed to include that ! every time? I’m not sure.) has a 10-minute interview with Caryn Holt of MidnightBSD. Also, the B-side of the interview is up.
In an effort to support a new system with an AMD 880G chipset, Matthew Dillon has updated the AHCI driver. If you have SATA drives using AHCI, please test. (with any chipset, not just 880G.)
I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted. Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process. (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)
Sascha Wildner has brought in some changes to twa(4), for various 3ware RAID controllers, from FreeBSD. Also, YONETANI Tomokazu has added PCI IDs fixed up files for Adaptec ServeRAID 7x ips (4) devices.
Two recent changes in the way virtual kernels are constructed should make a speed difference. The startup time is reduced (and more memory can be given to the vkernel), and the overall running speed should be quicker, too.
DragonFly’s version of pf (corresponding with OpenBSD’s 4.2 version) is now multiprocessor safe, to match the network stack. pf itself isn’t using multiple processors; it’s just able to work without causing problems in an otherwise MPSAFE environment, thanks again to Jan Lentfer. Note that there’s one minor caveat.
Swapoff has been added to DragonFly. This was a potential Summer of Code project, and also happened to have a bounty offered for it. $300 goes to Ilya Dryomov. If money for code like this interests you, check the Code Bounties page for more projects…
Dear universe: improved interrupt routing, or deduplication in HAMMER would make me happy. I’m not picky.
It’s another BSD audio recording! Our cup runneth over, as long as you have a cup that holds audio recordings. BSDTalk 196 has Mark Saad and George Neville-Neil, talking for 10 minutes about NYCBSDCon 2010.
I totally meant to post this yesterday. Oops!
- We’re using toeplitz. I just like the name; I don’t understand how it works.
- The idea of software forks has been around since, oh, BSD and System V Unix diverged, if not earlier. Here’s an article that talks about forking in general, rather breathlessly. After reading that, read this perhaps more accurate fork parody. (via)
- You know what we could use for pkgsrc, and all the other port/package collections? Explanation. They face the same problem phone application stores face: too many programs to easily select what you need. You could certainly build a whole site just around package reviews; it’s even possible to argue that Ubuntu or PC-BSD are built around just making some 3rd-party-app choices ahead of time on an existing operating system. Anyway, here’s an article talking about that idea specifically around the Apple App Store. Please won’t somebody who is not me do something like that for pkgsrc?
- This writeup of one man’s experience with Forth gives a good feel for the language, or at least as good a feel as I can understand. Posted in memoriam for our recently departed Forth bootloader. (via) There’s other enjoyable articles on that blog, too.
- This describes about two years of my life, except it was mostly Zangband.
Another B-Side show, this time with additional recordings from the pfSense show.