A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
A bunch of links, cause that’s the easiest way to get this all out:
This hasn’t been as clearly noted as it could be: there’s a DragonFly channel on IRC: #dragonflybsd on EFNet, with a steady population of users and developers. Please drop in.
I just finished the application for DragonFly to participate in Summer of Code 2009:
http://socghop.appspot.com/org_app/show/google/gsoc2009/dragonflybsd
We did well last year, so I’m hoping we will get in again. Check the website for this year’s details.
Big news: Sepherosa Ziehau has managed to remove the Big Giant Lock from the ip and bridge forwarding path. This includes ipfw, though not yet pf. It is in fact possible to make the whole TCP/UDP code path BGL-free. Sepeherosa helpfully posted some benchmarks to show just how significant the improvements can be.
Oliver Fromme has a new bootloader for FreeBSD and DragonFly. He’s added the DragonFly logo, and it looks neat. Can someone test this on physical hardware?
There’s a lot of BSD-related events and conferences happening; enough that it’s difficult to track them all. Dru Lavigne has a very good idea: Twitter them at @bsdevents.
wiki.dragonflybsd.org has been set to be read-only, since the content has been moved to www.dragonflybsd.org. The site hasn’t been turned off yet, because I may have missed something in the move…
This month’s @Play column dives into the playing mechanisms of XRogue, an older roguelike variant with some interesting features. Of special interest to geeks like me is the historical line drawn between XRogue features like charmed monsters and NetHack pets.
‘Sdävtaker’ posted that his school, Universidad de Buenos Aires, has a traveling teacher program. So, if you can teach computer science, there’s some funding for a 5-day trip to Argentina.
BSDTalk has Andrew Doran of NetBSD talking about the not-yet-out NetBSD 5 release, for 22 minutes.
With the new 0.10.0 release of Qemu, it’s a bit easier to get it running on DragonFly. Hasso Tepper asks that anyone who patched Qemu to run it on a DragonFly system send him the patches. He can get them into pkgsrc, and upstream.
Stathis Kamperis has written up a man page for objcache. Stathis is looking for feedback, though Sascha Wildner and Samuel J. Greear have already commented. More is welcome before it goes in.
(I’m especially happy about the concept of complete man pages, having been frustrated today by a newly installed Linux system that lacked man pages to match the installed drivers or utilities for the intended hardware. Yeah, I’m talking AsteriskNOW.)
If you were looking to create a very large or very small version of the DragonFly logo, I’ve added .eps and .ai versions of the logo to the images page on the DragonFly website.
The iwi(4) firmware has been updated, and there’s an announcement that tells you where to find it.
Happy Cube day!
– 10 Steps to UNIX Nirvana, not all of which may be useful, but it talks about cscope, which I have heard a number of people rave about. (via)
– Dru Lavigne posted more open source alternatives, this time including options for the always-a-problem Visio. (via)
– Producing Open Source Software, which I find interesting, and it’s available in dead tree form and as a free download. This fits with some conversations I’ve had recently.
If you are interested in the Google Summer of Code project, as a student, a mentor, or just want to suggest a project, write that down:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/gsoc2009/
The application period starts for DragonFly (for the organization, not students) in a week, and it’ll help to see who wants to get in on the action.
Daniel Phillips, who is working on the Tux3 filesystem, posted some more design notes. For those who joined recently, Tux3 is a filesystem similar in some ways to Hammer but being designed for Linux as its primary platform. This is a massively complex idea and project, so it’s good to peruse both the Tux3 site and prior posts about it.
I’ll mention this briefly, since it’s off-topic: I’m looking for a new job, and it should come as no surprise that I’d like to work with BSD systems. (resume as PDF)
