Paul Herman, Senior Researcher of the Kitchen Refrigerator, has a really nice writeup about time and clocks in operating systems (with graphs, even!), and work he wants to bring into DragonFly.
A bunch of changes came in:
hostname now takes a -r option that will set the hostname based on reverse lookup of an IP address, or -i which does the same using the computer’s primary IP. It also works on IPv4 or IPv6. This very good idea comes from Kent Ibbetson.
mixer has had FreeBSD-5 changes added in. It now can take relative volume changes, thanks to Craig Dooley.
Jeroen Ruigrok added in support for the SoundBlaster Audigy and Audigy 2, apparently sourced from “patches by Orlando Bassotto, which were taken from the ALSA Project and the SoundBlaster OSS repository”.
Max Laier’s if_xname patches have been commited; If I recall correctly, this allows for some different ways to refer to existing network interfaces. Here’s the original post.
Aaron Malone created a patch for src/sys/boot/forth/beastie.4th (now committed) that replaces the ‘beastie’ boot with a dragonfly. He’s working on a dragonfly ASCII console screen saver, too. Now we just need a graphical one too…
Michal Pasternak posted a plea for use of Pkgsrc to the submit discussion group. Given that he specifically said he wasn’t participating in that group and wasn’t going to do any work to make pkgsrc compatible, and that VFS is not yet complete, that’s probably as far as it will go. I’m editorializing.
YONETANI Tomokazu reported his laptop was running very hot with DragonFly. The CPU was running when it didn’t need to be; Matt Dillon fixed this.
Peter Kadau has been talking about changing the userland scheduler (which could be done dynamically, as Matt Dillon pointed out) and a post out of that discussion by Matt Dillon does a nice job of summing up the differences between DragonFly and FreeBSD-5 process management.
The USB system from FreeBSD-5 has been brought in wholesale. Matt Dillon reports his camera, hard drive, mouse, and memory key all working and un/repluggable.
Also, the network interface cloning API from FreeBSD-5 has been brought in, from work by Max Laier and David Rhodus.
Joerg Sonnenberger has been adding a lot of port overrides – freetype2, xmms, etc. Always make sure to check dfports first when you want to add software.
David Rhodus added the pst driver to the GENERIC kernel, so if you are trying to install to a machine using a Promise card as disk controller (for RAID, I assume), it oughta work.
Dan Melomedman, during a discussion about using/not using bash in the base system, pointed at execline as a better alternative to shell scripting.
Sendmail 8.12.10 and BIND 8.3.7-REL are in, thanks to David Rhodus.
The kernel option USER_LDT is now on by default, as it’s useful for ports like Wine, or mplayer, and will be needed for threading. Suggested by Craig Dooley.
David Leimbach and others have kdebase from CVS building now.
The Marvell Yukon chipset now supports multicast. A small thing, but I’m hurting for news.
dragonflybsd.org appears to be down, and the news server is not responding. I don’t know if this is planned or not.
Update an hour later: It’s OK.
Not much happening right now. A few people have noticed that the binary NVIDIA driver doesn’t seem to work; big surprise there, with the system being in rapid change. Otherwise, puttering with the new RCNG services layout continues. In local news, I have the DragonFly mail archive mostly working now, including the kernel list.
A dfports update for net/bsd-airtools has been committed; Craig Dooley noted that the device layout for DragonFly has changed, making this override needed.
Matt Dillon has enhanced the varsym/RCNG system to support the following “states” for various services:
| running | The service is running |
| failed | A start or stop operation failed |
| disabled | The service is disabled |
| irrelevant | The server is not needed |
| configured | The non-process service has been configured |
| stopped | The service has been stopped |
He also posted the following:
“Call for volunteers! There are many
rc.d/scripts which do not support ‘stop’. Things likesshdandrwho, for example. It would be great if interested parties could start adding ‘stop’ functionality to the more common services. Submit patch sets to submit@dragonflybsd.org”