‘walt’ wrote up a rather nice description about how debugging works, or at least how it can work.
UnixReview.com has several new articles: “Making a Dashboard Widget for Systems Administration Purposes” (for you Mac/BSD users), “Common Network Protocols“, focusing on Perl, and “John & Ed’s Scripting Screwups“.
Matthew Dillon posted his plans for the next release, which revolve around multiprocessor capability and the inclusion of pkgsrc. He also noted some of what he plans for immediately after the 1.4 release.
There’s been two updates on the DragonFly website: the 1.2 page now lists the changes in version 1.2.6, and the download page now lists the pkgsrc binary mirrors.
Matthew Dillon’s making some changes get get us just a little closer to removing the Big Giant Lock for multiprocessor systems; it’s now possible to treat certain interrupts, traps, and syscalls as mpsafe. mpsafe, for the acronymically challenged, is “multi-processor safe”.
Joerg Sonneberger’s commit makes clear his latest RC system changes make DragonFly more compatible with pkgsrc.
Joerg Sonnenberger posted a warning for those running DragonFly 1.2 systems that plan to move to 1.4: the RC system is changing slightly, removing a keyword issue.
Kamil Chatrnuch has created a DragonFly BSD group on Frappr, a “Friend Mapper” application. Add yourself and your interests, if you are so inclined.
The latest FreeBSD Status Report is up, with reports on a large variety of projects, including the results of a number of Google Summer of Code projects that used FreeBSD.
The pkgsrc guide (not DragonFly-specific; for that, see the wiki) has been translated into Brazilian Portuguese.
Why, yes, I am having a hard time finding newsworthy items today; why do you ask?
If you’re running the latest Development code, you will need to do a full build/install of world and kernel, because of a libc change. Matthew Dillon says so.
This week, UnixReview.com has book reviews of Networks, Security and Complexity and Digital Identity, along with a writeup of some Nagios plug-ins.
Matthew Dillon’s tsleep patches are in, making another chunk of code multiprocessor safe. The commit message comes with a good bit of explanation, too.
It’s labeled 3 but named 4. Either way, read the message to see the details.
And in another followup, several people pointed at the forcedepth Linux driver (for which I can’t find a link – help!) for Nvidia-chipset network cards as an alternative to get the Shuttle boards working. (previous story) Matthew Dillon’s going to look at them.
Matthew Dillon’s got another tsleep patch, along with some more comments.
Matthew Dillon’s got another tsleep patch for people, especially SMP users, to try out. As is usual, he has a good description of the work involved in producing it.
Matthew Dillon wrote out his final report on the Shuttle XPC with a AMD X2 dual-core processor. The short version: it works under the latest DragonFly code, except for the built-in ethernet. It’s zippy.
Joerg Sonnenberger wrote me to describe the preferred bug reporting path for pkgsrc issues on DragonFly:
1: Mail Joerg Sonnenberger or users@dragonflybsd.org
2: Mail DragonFly developers known to work on pkgsrc
3: send-pr, on the NetBSD site. (The first page I found for that looks to be focused on NetBSD…)
4: Mail to the tech-pkg@netbsd.org mailing list.