I missed the actual event, but this Digest reached over 1,000 comments recently – thanks to the folks that read and give feedback. The 1,000th comment was on the 1.10.1 release post. Incidentally, there’s close to 2,500 posted news items here, since August 2003.
Antonio Huete used sysbench to benchmark a DragonFly system running either libc_r or libthread_xu. Aggelos Economopoulos graphed the results so far.
Huete mentions that more results are forthcoming on more operating systems (same hardware), and they’ll be found here:
It’s the 10 year anniversary of pkgsrc, and to celebrate, netbsd.org has a page with some history and a large variety of interviews with various people involved with it in one way or another, including folks in other BSD projects that were influenced by this work. (Thanks, Joerg Sonnenberger and Mark Weinem for the heads-up)
Man, BSDTalk’s been on a roll lately. There’s a 7-minute update on OpenCon 2007 with Marc Balmer, in BSDTalk 133.
In a conversation about porting Bluetooth support from another BSD, Hasso Tepper posted his summary of the state of the stacks in FreeBSD and NetBSD.
The pkgsrc system will be changing how it lets you limit software installation by license. Right now, any open source license is considered acceptable; this change will make that more granular. Default behavior seems to be unchanged, so this should at least not cause a problem in terms of usage.
Something interesting: graphs of the commit activity for some (all?) of the OpenBSD committers. (via ‘constant’ on #dragonflybsd) I’d like to do the same for DragonFly. Plus, GIANT DAEMON HEAD.
The most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc is out; I’m building packages now on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org and a full set of binaries should be available in about a week. (That’s how long it takes to build all 7,000 or so packages, even on good hardware…)
I link to this recent IPv6 bug report for DragonFly not because it’s a spectacular problem, but because it’s one of the most well-researched bug reports (including a fix!) that I’ve seen in a while. The originating issue is fixed, now.
There’s more details on Matthew Dillon’s HAMMER file system, specifically detailing B-Tree usage.
BSDTalk 132 is with the man on the other side of the fence: Richard Stallman.
Klaus Heinz is looking for Nagios plugin users on DragonFly, among other systems, for testing the newest versions. Be warned: Geert Hendrickx discovered a bug that affects NetBSD and probably also DragonFly in the latest version of Nagios. There’s a fix listed, and should hopefully be updated before it hits pkgsrc.
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring BSDphone! Wired has a writeup on various smartphones that let you actually install software on the hardware you own, unlike some well-known examples. One of the phones mentioned is the Motorola A1200, or “Ming”, which is possibly BSD licensed open source code. Most of the pages that talk about it say “Linux-based”, so it may just be the translations, which are the only place I’ve seen BSD licensing mentioned so far.
Update: Poop. It’s just the translations. The operating system itself is a Linux 2.4 kernel.
Chris Turner posted some notes about hardware compatibility on AMD motherboards he’s used lately with DragonFly.
The (student) Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois is holding their annual Reflections/Projections conference this weekend. It has the usual technical presentations about 3D rendering, system automation, and the like. However, it also has a good amount of BSD content. There’s an executive from Wind River Systems, which has had some history with FreeBSD, an OpenBSD presentation, and two cartoonists – Randall Munroe, of xkcd fame, and Phil & Kaja Foglio who create, among other things, Girl Genius. Phil Foglio happens to be the original artist who drew the BSD daemon.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for ‘Agere ET1310 based Ethernet chips (PCIe only)’, with the new et(4) driver.
Matthew Dillon is starting to commit parts of his HAMMER file system work; he anticipates it being available in beta form by the 2.0 release at the end of this year. He posted a design document, describing how it should work. Some highlights from my reading of it:
- Maximum size: half an exabyte
- Infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy
- Streaming backups
- Asynchronous transactional support – no long fscks to check disk state
(Someone correct me if I’m summarizing inaccurately.) Some details from the ensuing discussion include comparisons with ZFS, RAID, and backups. KernelTrap also has a nice summary.
‘walt’ asked about the benefits of a tickless system. It would have some effect on system efficiency, and Constantine A. Murenin found it could make a measurable difference in power consumption
Welcome our newest committer: Thomas Nikolajsen.
Peter Avalos has updated less to version 4.0.8. I still never manage to think of this as a separate utility.
Also: He’s updated tcpdump to 3.9.8, libpcap to 0.9.8, and libarchive to 2.3.4. Thanks, Peter!