The BSDNews website has undergone a cosmetic change. Content and layout appears to remain the same, however.
OnLAMP/BSD has a new (and long!) interview of Colin Percival, who discovered the cache security flaw in multicore chips.
Colin primarily works on FreeBSD, but he very kindly sends alerts to DragonFly developers for issues that affect both code bases.
Chriss Pressey announced the 2005.0721 version of the BSD Installer. This version can partition disks and leave existing installed operating systems intact. Also, the entire session is saved in a repeatable script that doesn’t even require the installer to run, similar to RedHat’s Kickstart or other technologies.
There’s more changes, and a new upgrade feature that needs testing. Check the announcement for details.
Or rather, potentially no weekend update. A friend of mine is getting married this weekend, so news postings may be slow. I’ll catch up early next week, if need be.
Joerg Sonnenberger has updated zlib to version 1.2.3, for good reason.
BSDCertification.org has a new newsletter out, and a monstrous 143-page summary of the Task Summary Survey they conducted some time ago. Interestingly, 3.8% of respondents use DragonFly at school/work, which is more than I expected in this part of the development cycle.
OnLAMP/BSD is back in action with an article on the latest trend: Live CDs, this time for OpenBSD.
Also, UnixReview.com has new material,including a number of book reviews such as “Silence on the Wire” and the goofy-sounding but probably useful “Spring into Technical Writing for Engineers and Scientists“.
It’s a slow news day, for once, so here’s a minor bit of information: a definition of “rollup” for patches.
This site now has an index2.xml page that lists full stories without comments. The original XML page listed just the beginning of entries.
By the way, it’s time to renew your The Perl Journal subscription. The magazine’s successfully survived a full year, even printing in dead-tree format.
FreeBSD has 18 different Google Summer of Code projects, one of which is integrating our very own BSD Installer, among other very interesting ideas. There’s a wiki with information on a few of the proposals. NetBSD is also particpating, though there’s no list of accepted proposals online, yet. (hubertf will probably have something soon.)
Update: There’s a SourceForge project for the NetBSD Summer of Code work. (thanks, anonymous poster!) Ooh! Someone’s working on zeroconf!
Sascha Retzki brought up the idea of using a neural network scheduler, which would be possible to add in with other schedulers, in the future.
I knew what it was, but I never checked to see what a phy looks like.
Stream Control Transmission Protocol has been added by Eirik Nygaard; he lists some ways to test it out.
David Leimbach brought up a different journaling implementation that originated with Plan 9.
Updated: Matthew Dillon thought about this, and realized userland VFS is closer than he thought.
S/Key’s PAM module is out, so you may want to remove it from pam.conf.
(Corrected; thanks, Joerg)
Here’s a nice little summation of how to use the experimental ath driver (not in the base system).
The T1 for dragonflybsd.org is apparently having some trouble; it should be fixed soon.
Matthew Dillon’s latest journaling commit details an interesting new feature: changing the data destination “midstream”.
Yeah, yeah, it’s for Linux, but it’s good to see a game review for a Unixy operating system. Many games will play on BSD as well as Linux, sometimes natively.
Speaking of reviews and such, the ONLamp BSD page hasn’t been updated for almost 2 months. Come back, ONLamp! The main site has an interview with Mark Breyer of Covalent about the BSD license, though.