A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
John Marino has added a ‘gcc47’ compiler ccvar, so you can build world and kernel with it. ‘It’ is actually gcc-aux, since it seems to work better than the basic (“vanilla”?) gcc47. You also get Ada support, though that wasn’t the driving reason to pick it. This is brand new so don’t try it unless …
The release announcement for pkgsrc-2012Q2 is out. New in this quarterly release: statistics about clang and pkgsrc. A surprisingly large number of packages build just fine with clang instead of gcc.
I got to use the ‘roguelike’ tag again this week, which always makes me happy. Surprisingly, it’s not about… that roguelike. RSA encryption explained. (via) Someone from Google went to BSDCan 2012 and blogged about it. The takeaways are interesting, especially something I’ve seen elsewhere: “Don’t buy systems that can’t take registered RAM in a …
I’m going for more verbose linking. Because my opinion layered over a bunch of linkblogging is just what you wanted on a weekend, isn’t it? If not – too late! NYCBUG posts audio of their regular presentations, and I’m linking to this one by James K. Lowden, titled “Free Database Systems: What They Should Be, …
Whee! Do you like the Opera browser? Apparently all it takes is a little misspelling to confuse it with a U.S. daytime talk show host. The “Best of Oprah emails to Opera“. (via) Mistaken identity on the Internet is always fun. Popular free software licenses, described. (via) One of the better, non-polemic descriptions I’ve seen. …
I mentioned previously that Postgres 9 is already in pkgsrc, but the flip side of that is both Postgres 8.2, and MySQL 4 are being removed. If you still have these installed, be ready to migrate at your next upgrade. Oh, and you can switch to clang for building pkgsrc, too.
The compiler pcc, while having both history and speed, doesn’t get the attention that clang/LLVM gets. There’s a NetBSD blog article about building NetBSD with pcc. (via) I recall it couldn’t be used for DragonFly because of TLS support; I don’t know if that’s still an issue. It’s been covered here before.
Sascha Wildner has posted a patch that makes it very easy to switch out the compiler used to build DragonFly. This builds on earlier work from Alex Hornung. This should make it into the base system. Everyone’s looking at compilers that aren’t gcc these days, it seems.
A bunch of links, cause that’s the easiest way to get this all out: ‘Beket’ has added a vkernel debugging howto on the DragonFly site. The Open64 compiler may work may work with some tweaking on DragonFly. And llvm/clang too. You can use BSD almost any way you want. Linux, not so much. (via) Hammer …
Sascha Wildner has been fixing various bugs in DragonFly through use of reports generated by the LLVM/Clang static analyzer. There are many more fixes made by Sascha than what I linked here – thanks, Sascha!
pcc has been added to NetBSD (via pkgsrc) and OpenBSD, and Steve Mynott has been messing with it on DragonFly. It doesn’t work as a replacement for GCC, but it looks promising. There are other alternatives in progress, too.