rsync.net (which offers Backup Done Right, as far as I can tell) is offering a number of code bounties for various (mostly FreeBSD) projects. One of them is a standardized stress test for UFS2 – a general filesystem testing framework would do everyone good – especially someone using a distributed file system…
The PHP and PEAR packages in pkgsrc are being decoupled from each other, for ease of maintenance.
When we say DragonFly is a modern BSD, we mean it in every way. Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert taught morse(6) to produce actual sounds and allow them to be saved to a file, among other things.
There’s a variety of ways to turn on multiprocessing support in a kernel; Matthew Dillon recently explained the variety and reasoning.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has pointed out that pkg_rolling-replace is very helpful when recompiling to use a different threading library.
Peter Avalos has updated tnftp to the latest version.
I’m a bit slow in mentioning this, but: the most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2007Q1, is officially released.
Do you have a bge(4) network card? If so, Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to test his patch – it shouldn’t do anything but improve the card performance.
A very busy week on UnixReview.com: the oddly-titled Regular Expressions column “Tuple Spaces Help Organize Concurrency Solutions“, and Shell Corner’s “Perl Is a Gem: One-Liners and Programs“. There’s also an article called “The Joys of Data Classification“, along with book reviews of “UNIX: The Complete Reference, Second Edition“, and “Backup and Recovery“.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added the ability to switch between threading libraries. It needs a little bit more work, for which he could use the help – see the message for details.
Syslink, the method for having DragonFly systems communicate within a cluster, has been added in a basic form. This is the infrastructure – it can’t be used for clustering yet. (Don’t want to get anyone overexcited.) The man page isn’t online yet, but you can look at the raw page.
The USENIX 2007 Technical Conference will be on June 17th-22nd of this year, and early bird registration is due June 1st. There’s a number of ‘BSD People’ there, as speakers.
Apparently virtual kernels are useful no matter the operating system. (Thanks, somebody I lost the name of on #dragonflybsd)
A recent discussion of RAID cards revealed some known working 3ware models, plus the fact that Matthew Dillon plans to duplicate some RAID functionality at the filesystem level, probably by the end of the year.
Sendmail 8.14.1 is now tied into the codebase by Gregory Neil Shapiro; your milters may need recompilation if you are following DragonFly’s bleeding edge code. Also, binutils 2.17 has been added by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert.
XFCE 4.4 is available now in pkgsrc; it was in the wip/ branch until recently. If you want to contribute, you can test and package up the various available plugins for xfce.
Gregory Neil Shapiro has imported the Sendmail 8.14.1 source into DragonFly, but it’s not yet linked into the build. If you want to test it, there’s a patch available; otherwise it will be linked in soon.
LWN.net has an article up on DragonFly’s vkernel system, and this looks to be the first of several articles. (Thanks, Hasso Tepper in #dragonflybsd)
cvsup is an excellent program, allowing retrievals of file revisions from a cvsup server. It’s been traditionally used in FreeBSD and DragonFly to get updates to the system source… However, cvsup requires a working version of Modula-3 to build, and the C-based replacement, csup, can’t run as a server. Rsync is a common alternative that also offers good performance.
I did a comparison of the two, repeatedly running partial and full downloads from a DragonFly mirror that supplied the same data via both protocols. I posted the results, and dragonflybsd.org is now offering files via rsync.