Peter Avalos has upgraded libarchive to version 2.4.0, which apparently eats much less CPU than earlier, inspired by benchmarks comparing it to other tar implementations.
Sepherosa Ziehau has removed IPFW1; IPFW2, which is already in the system, is generally compatible from a configuration point of view. Check the ipfw man page to find out what’s different.
If you are running bleeding edge code, Sepherosa Ziehau has made changes to ipfw and dummynet that require a more complete rebuild of code on the next update.
Matthew Dillon warns of struct vattr changes being done to support his new filesystem, HAMMER. This may cause problems in userland, though of course this can only affect you if you are running the bleeding edge of code.
This Associated Press story about a teacher assigning Wikipedia article writing as a project for students notes that “Knowing their work was headed for the Web … helped students reach higher”. I’d draw a parallel to open source, since knowing your code (or perhaps your news blog…) will be viewed by multiple people encourages harder work. (Via)
This recent “Puffy’s Marathon” article covering the OpenBSD 4.2 release, on OnLAMP.com, mentions that the new OpenBSD support for Broadcom AirForce/AirPort Extreme devices (bwi(4)) came from Sepherosa Ziehau’s work in DragonFly.
Dmitry Komissaroff has done his own port of the bluetooth stack from NetBSD to DragonFly; check his early version out if you have suggestions, as he’s still working on some of the devices involved.
A recent PDF of an “About FreeBSD 7” presentation by Kris Kennaway includes DragonFly 1.8 results in some of its graphs. The graphs show results with sysbench and MySQL/PostgresSQL – unfortunately, DragonFly performance is still comparable to FreeBSD 4 because of the presence of the Giant Lock. (Thanks, Pieter Dumon)
MeetBSD is happening in about a month in Warsaw, Poland – registration is open now. (Via.)Â There’s already a good slate of speakers lined up.
There’s a pkgsrc hackathon coming up on November 3rd-4th – check the wiki page for more details. As with previous hackathons, communication is over IRC, so participation can be from anywhere.
BSDTalk has a 10-minute spot on AsiaBSDCon 2008 with Hiroki Sato and George Neville-Neil.
Andrew Atrens has a whole port of netgraph, including Bluetooth, waiting for integration. The Bluetooth part needs more work, but it is otherwise complete.
Hubert Feyrer found “T2“, a Linux-based third-party software compilation system that can cross-compile for multiple targets. He’s offering a small bounty (along with some others) for anyone who can get pkgsrc to accomplish the same level of cross-compilation as T2 within 6 months.
I’ve completed a build of the most recent quarterly version (2007Q3) of pkgsrc, and the files are present on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org. You can read a report of what did and did not build at the same site.
The FreeBSD Foundation is auctioning the first copy of the second edition of Michael Lucas’s “Absolute FreeBSD“. While you may not want to participate in the auction, I’ve read the first edition, and it’s a very enjoyable book.
Two smaller changes I’m mentioning together: YONETANI Tomokazu has brought in some ACPI resource manager updates from FreeBSD, and Sepherosa Ziehau has added jumbo buffer support to et(4), among other things.
The donations page will be cleaned out soon – please mention on kernel@ any DragonFly-related needs you have.