DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 335 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2007/11/062007/11/06

Programming languages, then and now

Some entertainment: This article at American Scientist talks about programming language choice and the arguments that have come up over the years. The bibliography at the end of this 5-page essay is worth special attention, because of the links to early documents describing these battles over languages and choices nobody thinks of these days, like PL/I or Cobol.

Some specific links to articles cited:

How do we tell truths that might hurt? (Edsger W. Dijkstra, 1975)
On holy wars and a plea for peace (Danny Cohen, 1980)
Why Pascal is Not My Favorite Programming Language (Brian W. Kernighan, 1981)
Computer Languages History (Ã‰ric LÃ©vÃ©nez, 2006)
Programming languages and their relationship styles (Meredith L. Patterson, 2006)

All the citations are worth investigating – take some time to read them.

2007/11/05

More ipfw changes

Sepherosa Ziehau has made more changes to ipfw, which means a more complete rebuild is required for bleeding edge users when upgrading.Â This is in addition to the earlier ipfw/dummynet changes.

2007/11/05

Everybody blogs, even ICANN

Hasso Tepper updated the root servers list to accomodate an IP change.Â The interesting part of this is Hasso linking to something I didn’t know existed: the ICANN blog.

2007/11/05

Sendmail updated to 8.14.2

Gregory Neil Shapiro has updated Sendmail to version 8.14.2.

2007/11/04

libarchive upgrade

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.

2007/11/03

No more ipfw1

Sepherosa Ziehau has removed IPFW1; IPFW2, which is already in the system, is generally compatible from a configuration point of view.Â Check the ipfw man page to find out what’s different.

2007/11/03

No realquick buildworld for you

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.

2007/11/02

Struct vattr changes coming up

Matthew Dillon warns of struct vattr changes being done to support his new filesystem, HAMMER.Â This may cause problems in userland, though of course this can only affect you if you are running the bleeding edge of code.

2007/11/02

Many eyes make for positive pressure

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 …Â helped students reach higher”.Â 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.Â (Via)

2007/11/02

Cross-pollination continues

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.

2007/11/01

HAMMER news

Matthew Dillon posted a note about HAMMER, his distributed file system.Â This post notes he’s accomplished the most difficult part, and a working system is on track for the end of the year.Â He’s made a pile of commits to match, too.

2007/10/312007/10/31

RIP, Itojun

Jun-ichiro “itojun” Itoh Hagino died on October 29th – a surprise and shock to many. Itojun was a major force behind IPv6 support in all the BSDs, and well-known for his patience and skill. Notes are showing up with more information here, here, and here. (Thanks, Hasso.)

2007/10/30

New Bluetooth stack

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.

2007/10/302007/10/30

FreeBSD, DragonFly benchmarking

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)

2007/10/29

MeetBSD 2007 registration open

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.

2007/10/28

Pkgsrc hackathon coming up

There’s a pkgsrc hackathon coming up on November 3rd-4th – check the wiki page for more details.Â As with previous hackathons, communication is over IRC, so participation can be from anywhere.

2007/10/27

BSDTalk 134: AsiaBSDCon 2008

BSDTalk has a 10-minute spot on AsiaBSDCon 2008 with Hiroki Sato and George Neville-Neil.

2007/10/26

OpenSSL updates

Peter Avalos has updated OpenSSL to version 0.9.8g.

2007/10/262007/10/29

Netgraph and Bluetooth addition available

Andrew Atrens has a whole port of netgraph, including Bluetooth, waiting for integration. The Bluetooth part needs more work, but it is otherwise complete.

2007/10/262007/10/29

Cross-compile for cash

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.