Lots of commits today: Matthew Dillon commited his BUF to BIO switch, and Sascha Wildner committed his large cleanup to almost all the man pages to conform to mdoc(7).
Things have been quiet for the past few days, so there’s few posts here. Take a look at the NetBSD News Beat if you’re hungry for links. Also, BSDNews.com appears to have become a lot more busy lately (perhaps it’s more automated).
Since DragonFly has been diverging from the FreeBSD 4 model, and because NVIDIA no longer produces a FreeBSD 4 X11 driver, there is no 3D acceleration for NVIDIA chipset video cards under DragonFly. It’s frustrating, though there are efforts to deal with this.
Looking at the latest version of xorg, there is mention in a few places of 3D support for more recent ATI cards, though it’s not reflected in the radeon man page.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added OpenSSH 4.3p2 to DragonFly.
Kevin L. Kane’s patch to add certain malloc features from OpenBSD has been added, by Matthew Dillon.
Strangely, this interview on the ACM Queue magazine site by Marshall Kirk McKusick of a former Enron sysadmin is quite informative on project planning with large groups. Amazingly, that is not a run-on sentence. (Thanks, Slashdot)
Stumbled into this: nmap‘s latest version has DragonFly support. It worked before, so I don’t know what changes are needed…
Release 1.4.1 is out now, for anyone tracking the Release line of DragonFly. Remember, try make quickkernel and make quickworld first, just because it can be faster.
A little tip picked up from Liam Foy Adrian Nida on #dragonflybsd on EFNet: If you have a 16-bit UTF file, cat and less will read it with ^@ characters all through the file. The pkgsrc package converters/recode will allow cleanup like so:
cat file.utf16 | recode utf16..ascii > file.ascii
Update: Several people pointed out that iconv can do the same thing.
OpenSSH 4.3 has been released, and it’ll be in DragonFly soon, though some of the new features may or may not work well.
BSDNews.com has a whole slew of new articles, some of which have been linked here before. Rather than call each out individually, I’ll say go, look.
Oliver Fromme wrote a nice description of how he backs up material on disk, skipping some file types and only archiving changed files.
libtool has been updated to 1.5.22nb1 – it should be ‘safe’ to build from pkgsrc again.
Joerg Sonnenberger has posted a patch for those who want to compile packages from pkgsrc that use libtool, as an interim measure. The new version that doesn’t have the aforementioned problems will be in the pksrc tree in the next day or two.
Matthew Dillon posted the first version of his BIO work, along with a lengthy technical explanation. He’s looking for testers that use different filesystems like vn, msdosfs, etc.
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.
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.
Seen on tech-pkg, the pkgsrc mailing list: the pkgsrc version of Mozilla will, due to a temporary restriction, build without the Mozilla name and logo unless manually set to do so. A recent email copied to tech-pkg@ explains why and how it will be fixed soon.