DragonFly BSD Digest

“Yair K” sent along a note mentioning that, as described on the OpenSolaris forums, 4Front Technologies (also involved with XMMS) is making their OpenSound system open source as of June 14th.

OpenSound was previously available for DragonFly, though support for it was quietly dropped probably around the same time 4Front stopped supporting FreeBSD 4. In any case, it is possible it could go into contrib/ now, if it has benefits – hopefully they will make it available under a more BSD-style license.

Network driver code has been shared between the BSDs a great deal lately, with a flowering of available drivers and support.  Having a shared sound model too would also lead to benefits greater than the sum of its parts.

For once, I remembered to check up on BSDTalk and see what was new: A talk with Rick Macklem, specifically about NFSv4.

Matthew Dillon wrote a long message on how things are progressing with DragonFly; some projects like improved SMP support and 64-bit processing are almost ready for prime time, and just need someone to step up and complete them. The track record so far for DragonFly has been astoundingly stable; major changes in threading and process management have gone into the tree and it’s happened completely without destabilizing the system – e.g. it’s been safe even to run bleeding-edge code.

Also: the upcoming release will be 1.10, and hopefully GCC4.x can be made the default by the time 2.0 arrives.

Matthew Dillon wrote up two notes – one describing how he launches remote ssh sessions in an xterm under FVWM2, and another on handling TCP timeouts using NAT.

From the DragonFly mailing lists: Matthew Dillon posted a list of what will and won’t be in the next release.  Rahul Siddharthan pointed out that there hasn’t been much user-visible improvement since FreeBSD-4, speaking specifically about 64-bit processors and SMP.  Steve O’Hara-Smith added some less well known benefits we already have, while Michael Talon  described the speed boost a 64-bit operating system gives.  Matthew Dillon said “someone just needs to do it“.  I daresay the conversation is not over.

Alexander Motin wrote to the kernel@ mailing list about netgraph in DragonFly; it was getting difficult for him to maintain compatibility with mpd4 in the FreeBSD-4 style netgraph in DragonFly and also support netgraph in FreeBSD.  Matthew Dillon said “Don’t wait up“.  Anyone feel like updating netgraph?  It’s probably not easy.

Preview, the version of DragonFly that is not-quite-bleeding-edge, has been updated so that everyone can try the latest version of NATA and virtual kernels.

We’re reaching the decision point where the new ATA system (disk system ported from FreeBSD, without GEOM) either should or should not be set as default for the next release.  Give it a try if you are running something later than 1.8.2, and report any issues.

It’s a week with variety on UnixReview.com: “More Forensic Tools“, a Shell Corner article: “Littera Delenda Est“, a Regular Expressions article: “Good Works with Real Databases“, and a product review: “Examining SlickEdit 2007: Code Quick | Think Slick“

Apparently pf has some significant speedups; updating the DragonFly version would have a nice benefit at this point.  (seen on Undeadly and by _hasso_ on #dragonflybsd)

Matthew Dillon wrote up an explanation of how his disklabel changes work out.

This is interesting: Getting Flash to work on FreeBSD without Linux compatibility.  It may apply to other BSDs – otherwise untested.  (Thanks, BSDNews)  If you want to do it with the Linux compatibility options, that’s documented on the wiki.

In an effort to make testing of a new installer easier, Matthew Dillon added support for having a virtual kernel boot from a CD image.  It works, though you can’t quite run an installer on it yet.

It’s a sparse week on UnixReview.com: Examining MySQL Certification, book reviews of “FISMA Certification and Accreditation Handbook“, and “PC Technician Street Smarts“. If you’re curious to know, FISMA stands for “Federal Information Security Management Act”, which means it’s probably only of interest to U.S. readers or people who enjoy  bureaucratic paperwork.