Thomas E. Spanjaard has NATA, the ‘new ATA’ code from FreeBSD, in the DragonFly source tree. It’s in, but not yet enabled, in release 1.8. If you want to try it out, or if you have certain newer hardware that demands it, he’s written how a document on how to enable NATA, on the wiki.
An ongoing conversation about ZFS and whatever distributed filesystem Matthew Dillon potentially writes led to some interesting links from Bill Hacker and Rupert Pigott: IBM’s GPFS, GridAFS, and Distributed Shared Memory.
Thanks to Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert, GCC 4.1, is now easily available, though it’s not yet the default compiler.
Seen several places: an article about using NULLFS, the BSD filesystem that enables the mounting of a filesystem over itself. If that sounds confusing, perhaps you should read the article. Conveniently, NULLFS in DragonFly was recently re-enabled.
OnLAMP/BSD has a new article up comparing a few firewalls. It only mentions “OpenBSD” as a software firewall, though what it’s really talking about is PF, which DragonFly also uses.
It wouldn’t be hard. There’s only two steps, neither of which are new, and it would be cool in a super-nerdy way to be able to save the state of an entire running virtual kernel.
If you like setting various compiler options at some risk to stability, Alexander Shiryaev has found a list of suggestions. Not surprisingly, it’s a Gentoo Linux page, and there’s also some caveats.
Seen a number of places: I’m BSD.
From Brett Estrade on IRC: the UC Berkeley EECS school has a recent paper out that talks about massively parallel systems and the future needs of those platforms. (That’s where DragonFly is going – parallel – and where it’s been – Berkeley.)
Geoff Speicher wrote a very nice transcript of the recent BSDTalk interview featuring Matthew Dillon.
Matthew Dillon has gone into some detail on his thoughts on what a clustering filesystem needs.
Sepherosa Ziehau, master of network drivers, has an update to test for the ipi(4)/ipw(4) driver.
Via waxy.org, a textfiles blog entry that describes the structure and events that happen to online communities. Some of it can be thought to apply to DragonFly or other BSDs.
Preview, the version of DragonFly inbetween released code and bleeding edge, has been slipped forward.
If you’re following the released version of DragonFly, the ‘slip’ tag (check your cvsup config file) is the most conservative possible way to update. Speaking of which, a 1.8.1 release is due soon.
hubertf has a post up about NetBSD’s work to move to a different multiprocessing scheme, along with a 1:1 threading model. This is similar to what DragonFly is doing, though a different methodology.
UnixReview has several new articles up: “Sprints Important in Open-Source World“,
a certification article: “Examining the Novell Certified Linux Engineer 10 Certification“, and
a book review of “WarDriving and Wireless Pen Testing“
AsiaBSDCon 2007 is March 8th through 11th in Tokyo this year, and the schedule is now available.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s looking for ideas on what people want to see at pkgsrcCon.