Boeing’s X-50A rotor craft is apparently named the “Dragonfly“. No real relation to this project, but it’s fun to see other places the name is used.
rsync remote exploit
David Rhodus noted that rsync is now at version 2.5.7 because of a remotely-exploitable heap overflow. Anyone running a rsync mirror, especially of DragonFly, should update. This is in part the exploit that damaged a Gentoo mirror and a GNU server.
libcaps halfway
Galen Sampson and Matt Dillon have committed the first stage of the userland threading – globaldata structure and thread primitives are connected, and libcaps can lock in a fashion similar to the existing kernel locks.
Temporary port fix
Peter Kadau noted that if you are building a program such as XFree86 and it complains about not being able to find a particular library that you know exists on your system, you can use cpdup to move it (between, for instance, /usr/local/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib).
This is a temporary fix. However, if you are experiencing this right now, it’s probably because of an out-of-date dfports. Delete all packages, update, and reinstall packages, and you should be OK.
Quiet for a reason
I haven’t had any posts for the past day or so because there’s not been a lot of activity on the mailing lists, and I’m working up an ‘end-of-year’ report similar to the FreeBSD Status Reports. No link yet, cause it’s not done.
Dillon diary done up
Matt Dillon’s updated his diary.
nrelease directory
/usr/src/nrelease has the ability to build the new ‘live’ CD iso images. Listed here is what Matt Dillon listed as possible make targets in that directory:
“release: This will do a full buildworld and buildkernel (GENERIC)
with the current source tree, then generate the release
ISO and directory structure in /usr/release.quickrel: This will do a ‘quick’ buildworld and buildkernel (i.e.
-DNOCLEAN) and then generate the release ISO and directory
structure in /usr/release.realquickrel: This is even faster. It assumes that the buildkernel and
buildworld have already been done and just generates the ISO
directory structure and ISO file in /usr/release.”
‘live CD’ available
Matt Dillon has created ‘live CD’ features, so you can boot from a DragonFly CD and get to a useable prompt. To support this, cpdup is now included in /bin, and mount_mfs now has the -C option, which will automatically copy a read-only filesystem into a MFS mount. An experimental ISO is available on the download page.
Be warned that you will have to lay out filesystems on your own with fdisk, disklabel, etc., and this is largely undocumented, except in the README.
Continue reading “‘live CD’ available”
BIND better
David Rhodus has checked in a new version of BIND, which may correct the recently discovered possible DoS. (commit notes don’t specify.)
Timing
So, it looks like this:
From an offhand comment Matt Dillon made, the first ‘release’ of Dragonfly is planned at least several months from now. (No definite date yet.) FreeBSD-5 should be entering a stable branch (5.3) around the same time, and the stable 2.6 Linux kernel should be appearing around mid-December, close to the same time as FreeBSD 5.2. KDE 3.2 should also be out in February. Gnome 2.6 is due in March.
So, early 2004 looks like it will have much to play with.
ekkoBSD link
Not much to report, in part because of the U.S. holiday, so here’s a link to a recently-announced OpenBSD variant: ekkoBSD.
BSD Party pictures
Matt Dillon has pictures posted from the BSD Party.
Misc. Code
libcaps in
Matt Dillon has added in a new ‘libcaps’ library, mostly for experimentation, which appears to be the base for userland threading.
Post quoted:
Continue reading “libcaps in”
No new groups … yet
Probably in part because of a long-running off-topic SCO thread in dragonfly.kernel, ‘trent’ suggested an advocacy or general group. Matt Dillon said “in a few months, just prior to the first release”.
k5admin -> kadmin
Emiel Kollof plans to change the Heimdal utilities to a format more similar to other platforms, unless someone else wants it.
No contrib changes
In a conversation about updating bind, several people noted that changes other than vendor updates to contrib can wait until there’s a complete packaging system in place. (i.e. things like bind and sendmail are staying in place, for now.)
Start cleanly
There’s been a number of people reporting various breakages during install or boot time. To weed out problems caused by old data right away, remember to:
rm -rf /usr/obj
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
Upcall mechanism in
Matt Dillon added an “upcall mechanism to support userland LWKT”. You can look at the man page for upc_register in source.
Another microkernel project
In a followup to the K42 post, Max Laier pointed at the L4Ka project, which is somewhat similar in scope.