Posted on

Social life

David P. Reese, Jr. noted that he will be at the Neal Stephenson talk in the Menlo Park Kepler’s Books on the 26th, and if there’s any other developers around, he’d like to meet up afterwards. Also, Matt Dillon noted he should throw a party when the namecache work is done.

Posted on

Code code code

Matt Dillon noted that if/when replacing K&R declarations with ANSI-compatible ones, watch for argument order:

(old style)
int
fubar(a, b, c)
int c;
int b;
int a;
{
}

(new style)
int
fubar(int a, int b, int c)

He also added: indent when the argument list wraps, and don’t try it in /usr/src/sys/ for the next few weeks, as he’s working there!

Also: ibotty submitted a patch that would let users mount devices to which they do not have write access, though this may be delayed until/overridden by VFS work.

Posted on

security fixes, additions

You may say to yourself, “Gosh, I hope the recent SSH and Sendmail holes are fixed in DragonFly BSD, too!” And you’d be right.

Miguel Mendez brought up the idea of using NetBSD’s Veriexec for more secure prebinding (which will also be committed, but not used by default); David Rhodus reports he has Veriexec working and will commit it soon.

Posted on

Syscall Separation

David P. Reese, Jr. has separated out the sendto/sendmesg/recvfrom/recvmsg calls and created kernel versions. 4.3BSD syscalls have been separated out, too, to src/sys/emulation/43bsd. (Patch pending)

Posted on

devfs and things I understand less

Matt Dillon pointed out that GEOM in FreeBSD may be something DragonFly can present a compatible API for, but it requires the messaging work for VFS and DEV first. Incidentally, Matt will be working on namecache, VOP_LOOKUP, Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert’s prebinding, and Jeffrey Hsu’s changes to ifq.

If, like me, you are clueless on what prebinding and ifq are, here an explanation of prebinding for OS X (should apply here) and ifq… appears to be the queue in which chunks of network information are held/passed? I haven’t found a good explanation. (Comments welcome, if you know)

asmodai pointed out xenofarm during a discussion of the tinderbox builds of DragonFly.

Posted on

Checkpoint

Kip Macy noted that he is working on a checkpoint/restart project, where an application can be ‘saved’ in a running state and later restored. This can be useful with programs that have a long runtime, or when debugging.

Posted on

dports created

Matt Dillon has created dports, a DragonFly-local override of /usr/ports from FreeBSD. This way, DragonFly can continue to use the FreeBSD ports system and changes/overrides can be placed in /usr/dports to handle changes. This is not permanent; it’s supposed to last until a new package system is devised, which should be after things like the VFS work is done.

Complete text of his post follows, as there’s some notes on how to check this out of cvs:
Continue reading “dports created”

Posted on

Catch-up

I’ll try to run through all the events that came through in the past few days.

– David Rhodus reports over 1000 iso downloads on dbsd.catpa.com, while Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert reports (since logging started) 129 unique downloads.

– David P. Reese Jr. has set up various split syscalls and set the linuxulator to use them.

– Matt Dillon pointed out the right name for this new OS is ‘DragonFly’, with the F capitalized. He also suggested starting a new ports (/usr/dports) system that would work as an ‘override’ to the carried-over FreeBSD ports system.

– There was some discussion of slogans for DragonFly, of which my favorite was David Leimbach’s “DragonFlyBSD: We’ve raised our standards… so up yours!”

– Robert Garrett brought rsync into the base system. Also, David Rhodus set up a cvsync server that carries both FreeBSD and DragonFly. (his config continued below.)
Continue reading “Catch-up”

Posted on

sysinstall finalized

From the discussions going on, it looks like the installation interface will be http based, using Apache, PHP, probably Python, and a text (links or elinks)/graphical browser depending on install environment.

A new topic coming up is: should cvsup be included, or something like it?

Posted on

Rounding up

No major events, but a few small items over the weekend and U.S. holiday:

– Hiten Pandya suggested creating downloadable patchsets for unstable items like ACPI that come from other operating systems, so that people can try them without placing unstable code into the default Dragonfly setup.

– Lots and lots of talk about sysinstall; nothing was really resolved other than that language preferences polarize discussion. Matt Dillon pointed out he was more interested in figuring out RCNG integration, in any case.

– If you, like me, aren’t familiar with RCNG, Jeremy Messenger posted these links (all about the NetBSD version, but that’s close) for more info:

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/rc/
http://www.cs.rmit.edu.au/~lukem/papers/rc.d.pdf
http://www.daemonnews.org/200108/rcdsystem.html
(Google cache if Daemonnews is unavailable.)

– Serial console support doesn’t seem to be working, though the settings should be the same as with FreeBSD-stable.

– I “announced” this web page, and nobody said anything bad. Yay!