Sepherosa Ziehau has a new networking patch that gives a 250Kpps performance boost under certain conditions. He’s looking for more hardware testers before next weekend, so if you have a network card on his list, give his patch a try.
We have a page up for the AMD64 port and another for DMA enhancement. I’ve asked all the students involved to create pages, so as they finish exams, I expect more summaries to arrive.
Matthew Dillon is setting up leaf.dragonflybsd.org to support vkernels, for Google Summer of Code students that are doing kernel work. Mail Matthew with your public key and desired username if you need an account.
One of the big wins for BSD has been the packaging system. It’s very easy to use ports or pkgsrc to download all the dependencies for a given application automatically, and even Linux tools like yum or apt-get handle this nowadays.
Ruby, Perl, Python, and etc. have the disadvantage that if you write a interpreted script that uses libraries not in the standard distribution of that language, users of that script need to perform additional software installation, assuming they have access to do so, just to run that script. This is a major disadvantage compared to “compiled” software. To overcome this, additional steps that turn the script and needed libraries into a single executable are required.
‘_why the lucky stiff’ has a solution that matches: Shoes, a Ruby GUI toolkit, goes and gets any needed libraries as part of its startup process. Why didn’t someone think of this 10 years ago so that it could be commonplace?
Dru Lavigne has news of the OSS Census now supporting BSD systems for counting; it’s good to participate and provide evidence of the number of BSD users out there.
She also has one of her infrequent but useful link posts up; check it and find more to read.
Google’s reporting that Unicode is finally becoming more popular than ASCII. This news is probably of most interest to non-English speakers, but it’s a good thing. How is DragonFly’s Unicode support – can someone comment? (Via)
I posted a little about this before, but here’s more prompted by several people mentioning it: a seekdir() bug found and fixed by Marc Balmer is apparently present in all BSDs, going back at least 25 years. 25 years! That’s older than some of you reading this post. His blog post delivers a very nice summary. (Thanks, Undeadly, Richard, Nega)
A recent post on the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list from Herb Peyerl describes one of pkgsrc’s biggest issues: upgrading. Much discussion ensued, with some solutions suggested, and others chiming in with similar experiences. It sounds like there’s pressure building to fix that part of pkgsrc, which I can only welcome.
This Perl Buzz post talks about improving the perception and use of Perl, one of my favorite languages. I link to it in part because it’s well written, but also to suggest something: read the article, and substitute “BSD” everywhere you read “Perl”. The same suggestions apply.
The prime motivator for this digest was providing more of an atmosphere for DragonFly, and to some extent for the idea of BSD itself. Lots of people aspire to be a BSD developer/committer, when really what we need is someone having a conversation that involves BSD.
zsh is one of those things that people always describe as a best version of something, like cvs vs. git or vi vs. vim (or BSD vs. Linux?). Philip Paeps has a lengthy blog writeup of his experience trying zsh. (via)
There’s a new BSD forum site, called DaemonForums. Looking at the comments, it appears to be a replacement for the now-unmaintained BSDForums.(Via)
Leonardo Taccari created a NetBSD reference card (link to 2-page PDF). The command section also applies, by and large, to DragonFly, as does the entire pkgsrc reference. (via Hubert Feyrer)
Samuel J. Greear asked about HAMMER and if it could be optimized for handling the somewhat-more-common-these-days Solid State Disk. Matthew Dillon responded, and some discussion ensued. (I’m linking to the posts because they’ve got the details.
Samuel J. Greear did an informal comparison of zip, gzip, bzip2, and 7zip, comparing compression ratio and compression time. 7zip looks pretty good, though testing it on some more varied file types and sizes would be in order.
Matthew Dillon posted another HAMMER status report, with handling a full file system the only remaining major item. It’s being tested now on his backup system. He’s also committing the final disk structure changes, so you will need to reformat any existing HAMMER volumes.
pkgsrcCon 5, in Berlin, Germany, June 13 – 15, is less than one month away from closing registration. Register now if you want to attend (since the hosting university does not allow walk-ins). If you want to present, your deadline is slightly earlier, on May 25th.
OpenBSD is, as usual, selling CDs of their 4.3 release. It appears that related-but-not-directly-linked goods like The Book of PF are being sold right along side.
The sight of a thick technical book with an included (and probably out of date) CD has been common for years; however, this reversal strikes me as a good idea. Selling a good book along with the operating system that will use it is worthwhile.
Martin Schütte is updating syslog (there’s an IETF standard for it, which I did not know) for one of NetBSD’s Google Summer of Code projects; he very kindly posted links to it on the DragonFly users@ list in the hopes that it could benefit DragonFly’s syslogd too.
Marc Balmer of OpenBSD posted about a cross-BSD bug in seekdir()/readdir(); a fix is forthcoming.
Sepherosa Ziehau has introduced ETHER_INPUT_CHAIN, which apparently gives a “~150Kpps” speed boost.