A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
Michael Neumann has come up with a way to automatically create pseudo file systems (PFS) when mirroring a Hammer volume. Previously, the destination/slave file system would have to be created first; this makes it Just Work.
This means Hammer data streams will be incompatible with versions before and after this change, but it’s not going to damage anything. Introducing a versioning system into Hammer data streams is an available project…
Some random links I’ve had built up:
I previously posted about Joe ‘Floid’ Kanowitz’s problem with the xorg driver for the ATI RS480 chipset. It turns out he went and figured out a workaround.
Fresh from the howling void: (Useful) Stupid Unix Tricks and (Useful) Stupid Vim Tricks. Caveat Emptor.
Update: Emacs too.
It looks like there’s already BSD-specific patches for OpenJDK according to commenter Samh; anyone want to see how well these would work for DragonFly?
Also, does someone want to work on interrupt routing for DragonFly? It’s tough and necessary work, but there are enough people that need it that there’s a potential bounty of $400 or more.
Do you have a Radeon card with a RS480 chipset? Joe ‘Floid’ Kanowitz noticed a problem when upgrading xorg; here’s his heads-up.
Stephane Russell pointed at work bringing the OpenJDK to the BSDs – anyone want to help out?
Thomas Nikolajsen turned the slides from Matt Dillon’s NYCBSDCon talk about Hammer into a PDF.
Marc G. Fournier reported hitting 25,000 BSD systems checking in to bsdstats.org; most of that is PC-BSD, where the bsdstats client is on by default. (It’s present in DragonFly but not on by default.) Some cross-posted acrimony followed, thankfully not from DragonFly users.
OpenBSD 4.4 is out, and OnLAMP (as usual) has a developer interview to match. They touch on a number of products that are also used in DragonFly, like the sensors framework and pf. (via)
Hey, there’s a part 2 to the @Play coverage of the the devnull NetHack Tounament! (Part 1 mentioned here if you missed it.)
txtfiles.com is having its 10th anniversary. Read up on Jason Scott’s history, which parallels the development of computer and the Internet for a lot of people (myself included), and then waste your afternoon browsing through all the data he has saved. If I had encountered something like this at 14 on my local BBS, it would have been amazing. For fun, look at the Hacking UNIX section, or perhaps Programming. (via)
Since it was mentioned on the mailing lists, I’ll mention it here: instructions on building a vkernel are in the Handbook. I may not have linked that before.
Matthew Dillon has made a scheduler change that apparently improves responsiveness when CPU load is high, to fix an issue reported by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert. Please test if you are running bleeding-edge code.
The latest @Play column on GameSetWatch talks about something I didn’t know existed: a NetHack tournament. Given NetHack’s difficulty, the scores it describes are insane.
I don’t recall if I mentioned this before, but the Google Summer of Code software (the part that Google manages) is now an open source project, for anyone to participate in. If and when DragonFly participates next year, this application is how it will be managed.
Hasso Tepper has posted a patch that brings DRM code in DragonFly to the very latest version, right out of the DRM repository. Give it a try; it adds support for a number of recent chipsets that may have only worked poorly before.
“Rumko” found that after upgrading clisp to version 2.47, pkgmanager stopped working for him. Watch out if you’ve been using pkgmanager to handle pkgsrc.
On an entirely personal note, I was having a conversation with my coworkers today about the change in technology within my lifetime; when I was young, there was no world wide web, no digital music, no timeshifting of TV programs, etc. etc. My workplace has an intern young enough to have never encountered these things.
Now, I noticed this musicmaking tutorial on Youtube. In 1985, this would have been done in a room filled with electronics, probably hand-built, with cabling run all over the place. Now, the software that accomplishes that, with a single computer, is expressly designed to simulate those old analog connections. It’s very wierd, and probably meaningless to those under 30.
Also, yay dubstep.