Matthew Dillon’s decided to use the journaling work that was done previously on DragonFly to handle communication between the kernel and a VFS, and also between machines in a cluster. He typed up a very detailed explanation that shows where a lot of the groundwork has been done. (Plus, a followup.)
This week on UnixReview.com: Reviews of Unix in a Nutshell, C in a Nutshell, SQL in a Nutshell, and a description of the LinuxWorld/NetworkWorld Conference.
Marcin Jessa pointed out that since it’s possible to compile the DesktopBSD tools on FreeBSD, it may also be possible on DragonFly.
‘walt’ has an patch for kdemultimedia that may make KMix, the KDE mixer, work on DragonFly. It’ll be in the pkgsrc binary soon.
Johannes Hofmann has made available a “crude” port of EST, a utility for Pentium M speed control, for DragonFly.
Some trivia about shutting down your DragonFly system: ‘shutdown -p now’ is the preferred way, though the rare laptop needs some tweaks. It’s also possible to get KDE to issue the command. While on the topic of power management, YONETANI Tomokazu is planning to update ACPI in the next month.
Matthew Dillon has rewritten the POSIX locking code, and included a small test utility.
One of the proposed projects for Google’s Summer of Code 2006 is a rewrite of pkg_install, which encompasses the various utility programs used for pkgsrc. The proposal is by Joerg Sonnenberger, who has commit access to both DragonFly and pkgsrc, and has made an astounding quantity of packages work on DragonFly.
Sascha Wildner’s removing a whole lot of kernel options. Speak up if you are using them… though if you are, they probably don’t work.
Anyone want to write a new devfs? (That’s device file system, if you haven’t seen the term before.) A discussion about tracking disks and their appropriate mount points ended with Matthew Dillon noting that at this point, the DragonFly system is cleaned up enough that this would be an approachable task for someone with experience.
This week on UnixReview.com: Security+ test review, plus examples, and a look at CherryPy, a Python framework. (Programming frameworks are all the rage lately, what with Ruby on Rails defining an otherwise nearly-unused language.)
Matthew Dillon has added the fix for the recent disclosure issue on AMD CPUs, described (for FreeBSD) in FreeBSD-SA-06:14.fpu.
DragonFly is (one of?) the first to plan for ZFS, but it appears another BSD – Mac OS X – may also take it up. More information is (unsurprisingly) on the Wikipedia ZFS entry. Gee, it’d be nice to have ZFS across all BSD platforms, wouldn’t it?
PC-BSD, which is FreeBSD 6 with KDE 3.5 and a GUI package management system, is now at version 1.0. I can only describe it as the way a BSD should be packaged.
Some relative stats on how platforms are doing with pkgsrc; results found in recent entries to the pkgsrc-bulk mailing list.
NetBSD 3.0_STABLE/i386 96%
NetBSD 3.99.18/i386 94%
NetBSD 2.1/i386 92%
NetBSD 1.6.2/i386 92%
DragonFly/i386 90%
NetBSD 3.0/x86_64 87%
NetBSD 2.1/sparc 82%
Darwin 8.5.0/powerpc 60%
IRIX64 6.5/mipseb 31%
DragonFly appears to be the best place to run pkgsrc, if you aren’t running NetBSD.
One of the design goals for DragonFly is creating a BSD with clean, clear code. Here’s one example.
Matthew Dillon would like feedback and perhaps even testing on his BUF/BIO separation patch.