Matthew Dillon reported that DragonFly Preview code (version 1.7) have been synchronized with the bleeding-edge code, as it’s been stable. Also, the 1.8 release is definitely scheduled for January, at which point he plans to have “at least a basic userland kernel binary”.
‘nega’ reports a DragonFly 1.4 has gone for most of a year without issue; good news for an operating system undergoing heavy surgery.
A fellow named Trismegistos is interested in creating an Italian BSD community; if you’re interested, contact him at tr1sm3g1st0s@gmail.com.
Something less obvious about the open source model (and, of course, the DragonFly project) is the relatively egalitarian playing field for anyone who wants to contribute. The worst thing that can happen is a rude email. Via Slashdot comes the story of how a simple menu was too long and still
wrong.
Mike Tancsa is doing some throughput testing on different versions of FreeBSD, Linux, and DragonFly. DragonFly does relatively well for a system in the middle of a dramatic change.
The new site look has been extended to wiki.dragonflybsd.org, the CVSWeb output, and the mail archive. Also, usage of the bug tracker has increased lately, with a significant reduction in the number of outstanding bugs. If you do happen to have any pending bugs reports on the tracker (which includes posts to the bugs@ mailing list), please update or close them.
A mysterious user posted a link to the VMWare site, where you can find a DragonFly 1.6.2 VMWare image with some preloaded software. It’s entertainingly called ‘DAMP’, for ‘DragonFly + Apache + MySQL + Postgres/PHP’.
Erik Wikström and Sascha Wildner have some reading recommendations for those interested in programming for operating systems.
The next release is planned for January. Incidentally, one of the changes mentioned in that linked message is available now as a patch, for testing.
The latest bsdtalk (which I mention far less than I should) has a talk with pkgsrc developer Johnny Lam.
As Armin Arh found out recently, FreeBSD uses UFS2, which can’t be read by DragonFly. If you want to install FreeBSD and DragonFly on a system, and share drives, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a strategy.
Recently on the pkgsrc tech-pkg list, Roland Illig posted the developer-oriented “How to get help with pkgsrc / pkgsrc documentation“, and Alistair Crooks posted “Changes to the Packages Collection in October 2006“.
Matthew Dillon pointed out, with examples, that DragonFly’s NULLFS (in bleeding edge code) is now flexible to the point where you can remount arbitrary locations in your filesystem anywhere you want, which is very handy for chroot(8) or jail(8).
Erik Wikstrom wrote up a mini-tutorial about cvsup, for those who want to know.
dragonflybsd.org has been given a makeover, by yours truly.
Gary Stanley (‘Ancient’ on #dragonflybsd) has posted a patch against the most recent DragonFly sources that adds SCSI domain validation. It ought to work on older releases, too.
The name isn’t exciting, but SCSI domain validation ensures your SCSI bus runs as fast as possible. If you have the hardware for it, try it out.
Also, if you’re in a testing mood, Matthew Dillon has posted a new version of kern_objcache.c, using spinlocks instead of tokens, coming from a longer conversation detailing locking models in DragonFly.
It’s been reported that most every flavor of BSD (including DragonFly) has a FireWire bug allowing a local user to dump all system memory by passing a negative value to an ioctl. This is reported as part of the Month of Kernel Bugs, though that project’s web page doesn’t list it.
Joerg Sonnenberger pointed out that it isn’t a problem on i386 systems, as copyout checks that the argument doesn’t intrude into userland or beyond address space.
Porting/coding machine Sepherosa Ziehau has added stge(4) support, which works with a number of gigabit ethernet cards.
As Joerg Sonnenberger recently described, his ‘stable‘ group of binary pkgsrc packages comes from the regular pkgsrc quarterly releases, and the ‘current‘ batch comes from whatever is in pkgsrc at the time of the build. Stick with ‘stable’ for the most dependable results.