DragonFly BSD Digest

Adrian Michael Nida has created a patch from Andrew Atrens’ work that will allow a Atheros-based wireless card to work on the current release of DragonFly and use WPA. Andrew Atrens does have some corrections. If you have this hardware, please give it a whirl; as patches for this have been around for a while, and it would be nice to have it in the tree.

“walt” listed the kernel debugging tips found on the wiki, along with some additional tidbits.

Matthew Dillon is starting major work on the buffer cache, implementing BIO chaining in the current step. This involves touching a lot of files, so he asks that all developers avoid commiting kernel changes for the next few days.

Not that new, but new to me: The NetBSD News Beat, which appears to pick up news through RSS, including from this very site! Links within my posts vanish, unfortunately, as my XML feed doesn’t keep them.

Kevin L. Kane submitted a large number of malloc changes, taken from OpenBSD. Emil Mikulic has a linkexplanation of the changes, from OpenBSD.

Xorg 6.9 is now in the DragonFly binary pkgsrc archive, as noted recently by Joerg Sonnenberger.

Check the Xorg link above if you don’t know the difference between Xorg 6.9 and 7.0. The new features list mention DragonFly BSD support, along with some odd things like support of mice with more than 12 buttons.

Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert gave a little summary of how he uses vim and cscope to view (without leaving the editor) a definition of the current identifier, and so on. Beats having to browse a separate archive, and it works without having to go out to the network.

‘walt’ brought up the problem that if we use ZFS for DragonFly, we are reliant on a proprietary tool. Could Sun “take it away”, a favorite threat attributed to closed-source? No.

UnixReview.com this week has an ‘examination’ of the CISA and CISM certifications, plus an article about the relative value of certifications.

David Rhodus needs to read Excel files. Joerg Sonnenberger is fixing up OpenOffice 2 and Gnumeric in pkgsrc to work, while Eli Green suggests the program antiexcel.

Csaba Henk posted a link to Sun’s OpenGrok source code search engine. He’s got a version running at http://dragonfly.creo.hu/source.

This makes me think of two things: 1: Sun’s sure putting out a lot of neat stuff and 2: I always hated Stranger In A Strange Land.

UnixReview.com this week has only two articles: a book review of “Running IPv6” and “Regular Expressions: Rexx Still Going Strong“.

The NetBSD quarterly report (that seems to cover a half instead of a quarter; July – December 2005) is out. It covers their new logo, their new releases, new developers and ports, etc. Also, DragonFly’s adoption of pkgsrc is mentioned, along with the fact that Joerg Sonnenberger is more or less responsible for over 3,000 of the successful pkgsrc builds on DragonFly.

The fourth quarter Status Report for FreeBSD is out. Among other items of interest, the report contains links to two recent presentations at EuroBSDCon: New Networking Features in FreeBSD 6.0 and Optimizing the FreeBSD IP and TCP Stack (both links are PDF files). Also, OpenBSD’s dhclient has replaced ISC’s dhclient, and efforts to port DragonFly’s variant symlinks.

For entertainment value, there’s also the FreeBSD/XBox port, which is close to having network support. There’s now a FreeBSD list of available work for volunteers; there’s a number of DragonFly items on there.

Update: PDF links fixed, thanks to Joe “Floid” Kanowitz.

David Rhodus brought up the idea of bounties for DragonFly. Would you pay money for certain one-off programming projects?

Update: Matthew Dillon doesn’t care for it, which makes it unlikely to happen.