DragonFly BSD Digest

I wrote down the explicit steps I used to get a DragonFly machine running and up-to-date; I’m including them here for the benefit of others. This was working as of mid-September.

** Updated December 2003; silly typos.

** Update February 2004: This guide was written using FreeBSD 4.8 as a guide; it may break. There is a guide page on dragonflybsd.org that talks about upgrading from FreeBSD 4.9.
Continue reading “Installing from source”

The Slashdot interview with Matt Dillon from last night is up, in text and HTML format.

For the heck of it, there’s a pre-DragonFly interview here on KernelTrap, too.

Kip Macy listed a number of tasks left for his checkpoint/restart work, not all of which he will be covering. If this sounds interesting to you, jump in!
Continue reading “Remaining Checkpoint work”

In part of a conversation about checkpoint work, Matt Dillon described the preferred process for code changes. I’m pasting it in, wholesale.
Continue reading “How to do a diff”

Kip Macy’s very spiffy checkpoint work, allowing freezing/thawing of running applications, has resulted in a kernel module. It’s not yet in, but the most recent version he mentioned is available.

Paul Jarc brought up “>Slashpackage as a possible solution to the ports system on DragonFly; Mike Porter pointed out that it covers most everything except shared library handling.

Emiel Kollof is working on the NVIDIA binary video driver; so far it loads correctly, but doesn’t work in X11.

In other discussion about a microkernel, Gary Thorpe noted these historical links about softupdates:

http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/tune/5.html#a3
http://www.netbsd.org/Documentation/misc/#softdeps
http://www.mckusick.com/softdep/index.html
http://www.usenix.org/publications/library/proceedings/usenix99/mckusick.html

And Pedro Guffuni followed up with this:

http://www.ece.cmu.edu/~ganger/smallfiles.html

Joshua Coombs noted he would like to work on a new firewall strategy for DragonFly, and pasted in some of his notes. They are complex enough that it’s better to paste than to sum up. (I sure could use the multiple routes he talks about.)

Pasted material follows:
Continue reading “Firewall Fun”

It looks like the PC Card problems mentioned earlier are really a problem with the DHCP client. David Rhodus is looking for someone to try a new import of the ISC DHCP code. (Updated – an import from FreeBSD-5 is happening instead, since that fixes some problems with the most recent ISC code.)

Galen Sampson found that using NFS without -maproot will cause file truncation; Matt Dillon has a temporary hack that will fix it, which will be committed by the end of the week if it works without trouble.

Matt Dillon disabled background bitmap writes, as it can apparently cause certain race conditions. He notes: “Eventually the problem background bitmap writes solved will be solved more generally by implementing page COWing durign [sic] device I/O to avoid stalls on pages undergoing write I/O.”

There’s a Slashdot article noting that Matt Dillon will be available for a Q&A session. It’s on Thursday, Oct. 9th, 9 PM EDT in SlashNET’s #forum. If you miss it, it should be later available in http://www.slashnet.org/forums/.

Emiel Kollof found that to get a PCMCIA network card going, you need to add these lines to /etc/rc.conf: (replace x’s with your static address, if applicable.)


removable_interfaces="<interface name>"
pccard_ifconfig="inet xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx netmask xxx.xxx.xxx.xxx"
or
pccard_ifconfig="DHCP"

John De Boskey posted he had variant symlinks working under FreeBSD 4-Stable, and notes these patches:

http://people.freebsd.org/~jwd/mlinks/freebsd-magic-patches
http://people.freebsd.org/~jwd/mlinks/env-magic-patches

And this post to freebsd-stable.

During a separate thread about microkernels (short summary: it ain’t happening), Pedro Guffuni pointed out Exokernel, a OS project where most everything was in libraries.

Emiel Kollof made a bootsplash screen at 800x600x8, available here. Download, ungzip to /boot, and put these lines in your loader.conf:


vesa_load="YES"
splash_bmp_load="YES"
bitmap_load="YES"
bitmap_name="dfly.bmp"


The screen, incidentally, looks just like the main site logo.

Mike Porter wrote an extended entry about how variant symlinks could handle multiple versions of ports being installed, including a number of special cases like Perl and the modules installed for it.
Continue reading “Variant Symlink explanations”

César Duque posted his own take on how the DragonFly page should look:
http://www.notfound.org/df (it’s a large jpeg.)