dfports report

Joerg Sonnenberger has done some major cleanup to dfports. A cvsup would be a good idea.

A quote from him follows:

“Hi all, next time you update your dfports tree, you must update
/usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mk and /usr/share/mk/bsd.dfport.mk too. This should fix a lot of the problems various people mentioned in the past weeks. You should also check the dependencies e.g. of GTK+, if you haven’t rebuild your ports after January 25th. Otherwise the dependencies recorded are supposedly broken.”

ACPI added

Matt Dillon has brought in the December 2003 release of ACPI (acpica-unix-20031203) from Intel. The old code is still what’s on by default, as the new code builds but does not yet work.

Living dangerously

Peter Kadau answered a question from Jonathon McKitrick about getting rid of your boot manager, if you just have DragonFly:

boot0cfg -o noupdate -s 1 -t 0 -B ad0

Matt Dillon followed up on the topic mentioning that the ‘Dangerously Dedicated’ mode from the old FreeBSD installer is probably no longer worthwhile, and may even cause problems.

ATAng just in case

Matt Dillon posted that if the recent ATAng integration keeps your IDE controller from working (though the opposite is more common), do:

#define NO_ATANG in /usr/src/sys/dev/disk/ata/ata-all.h

Propolice at least

Tomaz Borstnar noted that propolice support is still there for GCC2 (the only compiler at the time it was added) but not yet for GCC3. Matt Dillon followed up saying that other ‘gcc3isms’ have to be cleaned up first, though integration shouldn’t be hard.

SATA support, sorta

Matt Dillon’s added experimental support for the Silicon Image 3512 SATA controller.

Incidentally, credit goes to David Rhodus for generating the base patch for all the ATAng work committed by Matt Dillon yesterday.

ATAng added

Matt Dillon has brought in ATAng from FreeBSD 4 except for “the dma chipset changes and the busdma changes”, while retaining the apparently better DragonFly MPIPE version.

Spamfilters on

Spam filters have been turned on for the various DragonFly lists: (Taken from Matt Dillon’s post explaining this)


  • Matches against certain really annoying viruses
  • With a MIME Content-Type header of text/html
  • With a MIME Content-Type header of multipart/alternative
  • Without a working reverse DNS lookup
  • Without a FQDN formatted HELO line
  • With an invalid envelope sender. The spam filter does a realtime
    connect back to the SMTP server associated with the envelope sender
    and attempts to RCPT to it. If this fails the mail will be rejected.

Greek to me

Xin Li pointed out a race condition in FreeBSD that exists in DragonFly too. Matt Dillon, on further inspection, found a deeper problem. I’m pasting his description here because he’s speaking another language – I don’t even recognize the acronyms he’s using.

Alan Cox responded with a link to the CMU Mach algorithm on this page as an example of a correct implementation.
Continue reading “Greek to me”

Threading thread

There’s been a slight conversation about threading, where Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven mentioned he would want hybrid, or M:N threading. Miguel Mendez chimed in that 1:1 threading, while not as spiffy, is easier to implement and Sten Spans posted a link to this PDF describing 1:1 threading in Linux. (I assume – haven’t read it yet) Matt Dillon brought up a larger issue: asynchronous syscall messaging support is needed before any of this thread work can be done.