Joerg Sonnenberger’s looking for ideas on what people want to see at pkgsrcCon.
It’s very easy to debug a virtual kernel, using gdb, with one caveat/fix.
‘timofonic’ linked to Luigi Rizzo’s work on emulating Linux for the purpose of running Linux-specific device drivers, kind of like Project Evil.
It’s not possible yet, but Matthew Dillon outlined the steps needed to get checkpointing and virtual kernels working together – you could start a kernel, and ‘freeze’ its state – even sending the resultant file to someone to restart and debug.
DragonFly picks up a passing mention in this blog post of someone fighting with pkgsrc on Linux. DragonFly 1.8 itself get tried by this developer, but rejected because KDM won’t work.
Jonathan Weeks noticed this thread about DragonFly’s 1.8 release on OSNews, with much ensuing discussion. (it’s somewhat partisan, so don’t put too much work into reading it.)
pkgsrcCon number 4 will be held this April. If you’d like to present a pkgsrc-related paper there, the call for presentations is out.
Alas, we knew it well.
Matthew Dillon mentioned that he was trying to decide on what filesystem to use that would help with clustering. The general consensus is “ZFS“, but other filesystems entered the conversation, like LFS (still working on NetBSD) and Plan 9. Also: an explanation of filesystem snapshots.
Sepherosa Ziehau has an major update to the ath(4) wireless networking driver; try it out if you have the equipment.
Matthew Dillon has a rather lengthy writeup of the needs of a filesystem in a clustered latent environment. (i.e. DragonFly’s goal)
This wasn’t on DragonFly, but it can apply: a BSDNexus post detailed the benchmark differences between Win4BSD, VMWare, and native Windows.
Found on the web: WarpBSD, a “project to incorporate OS/2 support into FreeBSD”, though it sounds like the vkernel now makes DragonFly a better choice.
Version 1.8 has been released! See the release announcement, or proceed directly to the download page (and errata).
Updated: mentioned on BSDNews, Reddit, and Digg. Download also available as a Metalink. (Description at metalinker.org)
If you want to read a very dense chunk of text, the “December 2006 Pkgsrc Changes Summary” is out.
UnixReview.com has 2 new articles up: “Parsing Web Form Input in CGI Shell Scripts“, which deals with the crazy notion of shell scripts handling interactive web pages, and “New Year, More Security Challenges“, which covers some U.S. federal law changes for 2007 that require computer data as part of the discovery phase of a lawsuit.
OnLAMP.com has a nice interview of the people behind PC-BSD, and details on their latest release.
I’ve changed the theme, and added some elements to make this match the other DragonFly sites a bit more. If I’ve removed a link you need, please let me know.
Jeremy C. Reed is writing an article about DragonFly’s virtual kernel, and he had some comprehensive questions. Matthew Dillon had some answers which make a good read.
1.8 has been branched in CVS, and release is scheduled for Monday.
An ongoing conversation about virtual kernels led to a description of just how virtual kernel and real kernel memory usage interacts; they are surprisingly well synchronized.