Matthew Dillon has committed a significant amount of work from Jordan Gordeev’s Summer of Code project, for AMD64 support. (It is very close to being able to completely boot an AMD64 kernel) As he says in the commit message, the code is the product of many folks, but with much credit to Jordan Gordeev for getting the work to this point. As far as I know, Jordan will continue working on this past the Summer of Code, which makes it a double success.
Dru Lavigne brings news of oDesk offering a BSD job trends page and RSS feed – focusing on FreeBSD, since I daresay that’s the largest part of the market. More like this please!
The latest @Play column on GameSetWatch describes something I never expected to see: graphical, accessible versions of NetHack. Is part of the experience for some people staring at a terminal?
Not news, but a succinct description of DragonFly’s scheduler. Bits of what’s described there have shown up in news posts here, but I think this is the first full description.
Eric Gillespie posted in the pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org to announce the apache22 package now has shared module support; it’s not on by default. (Apache’s a common enough program that it’s worth singling out this announcement.)
Damian Vicino wrote up his experience presenting DragonFly at JRSL 2008; it apparently was lightly attended because of another big event, but the DragonFly presentation was interesting enough they ran long and had to keep answering questions even after the next presentation started. (previously mentioned here)
As part of a larger discussion about transactional file systems, Dmitri Nikulin posted a link to two relatively recent blog posts by Jeff Robinson talking about I/O atomicity and file offset semantics.
For those readers who use vi or vim or another vi-like editor, here’s an interesting writeup of how to make vim really work for you. Emacs users, please look away. (via someone on IRC)
5 years of this Digest, with around 3,000 posts, starting from the first in 2003. Why isn’t there more like this, more frequently, in the BSD world?
The pkg_radd utility that comes with DragonFly downloads binary pkgsrc packages from a variety of mirrors and installs them automatically. However, the mirror script wasn’t redirecting to servers other than the overloaded pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org; I corrected that and it now downloads randomly from a number of mirrors.
Matthew Dillon’s been committing parts (example link) of Jordan Gordeev’s Summer of Code project for AMD64 support. It’s not done yet, but it should be by end-of-year.
KernelTrap has a nice article up covering Daniel Phillips’ description of the Tux3 file system structure, which will be interesting to anyone who followed the previous file system discussion between Phillips and Matthew Dillon.
I’m not sure if I’ve linked to this before, so anyway: Robert Luciani linked to a nice image explaining how threads work in DragonFly, translating from pthread to LWP to LWKT.
MeetBSD 2008 is happening November 15th and 16th, at the Googleplex. This one coincides with the 15th anniversary of FreeBSD, too. Check the Speakers page for details on what’s happening.
As Dru Lavigne noted a few days ago, the August issue of the Open Source Business Resource, focusing on Education, is now available.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s work on parallelizing DragonFly networking can be tried out (for those running bleeding edge code) by setting the sysctl kern.intr_mpsafe to 1.
The second issue of BSD Magazine is out, though the details aren’t up on the magazine’s site as of this writing – freebsdnews.net has the cover and contents. This issue gets into OpenBSD. (via)
I had a conversation with a coworker today about what phone to buy, and I thought about this: iPhones are pretty, but you don’t get to own your software or fully choose what to run. This developer’s blog entry sums up all the things you can’t do with Apple’s App Store, and by doing so manages to describe the opposite of open source. (via, I think) The point I’m making: BSD licensing is more valuable than you think.
The latest BSDTalk (actually from August 18th – I’m still catching up) has Isaac Levy and Steven Kreuzer talking about NYCBSDCon 2008, coming up October 11-12. It’s 15 minutes total.