A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Petr Janda linked to a review of the open-source ‘Nouveau’ NVIDIA drivers, which plan to have 3D support. Also, Gergo Szakal found that a recent poll on the Hungarian Unix Portal listed DragonFly as the 4th most popular BSD-based operating system – more popular than NetBSD.
The binary driver (“blob”) for NVIDIA video cards contained, until recently, a remote root exploit. Maybe those anti-binary people aren’t completely crazy. (Thanks, Undeadly)
Sepherosa Ziehau has added hostapd(8) support, plus nVidia MCP61/65 GigE support to the if_nfe driver, from FreeBSD/OpenBSD.
Sepherosa Ziehau has ported nfe(4), support for NVIDIA PCI ethernet adapters, from OpenBSD, with some changes and improvements.
Sepherosa Ziehau has two patches for people to try: miibus(4) for network PHY chips and nfe(4), for NVIDIA ethernet controllers.
Emiel Kollof, who at one point had managed to get the NVIDIA binary video driver working for FreeBSD, doesn’t think it’s going to happen again.
And in another followup, several people pointed at the forcedepth Linux driver (for which I can’t find a link – help!) for Nvidia-chipset network cards as an alternative to get the Shuttle boards working. (previous story) Matthew Dillon’s going to look at them.
If you happen to live in Holland with some spare NVIDIA cards, SMP motherboards, or hard drives, or you live anywhere in the US with a spare laptop that could run DragonFly, then you should be looking at the Donations page.
There’s been over 50 commits made in the past two days, including such things as nvidia-driver improvements from Emiel Kollof, a pkill import from Chris Pressey, and wicontrol updates from Joerg Sonennberger.
Joerg Sonnenberger is merging some FreeBSD 5.x changes to kobj, which changes the ABI. This means rebuild all modules on your next kernel build. That includes your nvidia driver, too, if you have it.
usr/share/examples/splash has been committed. This is the logo screen Emiel Kollof made from the DragonFly logo. Emiel Kollof’s also got the NVIDIA binary video driver working; it should show up in dfports.