The scheduler has been rewritten by Matthew Dillon – again! Except this time, it’s very close to the original CSRG implementation. The eventual goal is to allow other schedulers to be used, on the fly.
OSNews has an interview about what’s planned for FreeBSD. Not much bearing on DragonFly, other than it’s interesting to see where the design goals match and diverge.
Matthew Dillon hints that using polling may be a way to get a finicky PCMCIA network card to work.
Jeffrey Hsu has replaced the FreeBSD-based file descriptor allocator with a new algorithm of his own design, apparently influenced by Solaris. It scales like no other.
Hiten Pandya describes ‘makewhatis -o local-manpages.txt‘ as a quick trick to make a reference list of available utilities.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert is looking for people willing to test his DRM/DRI changes; if you’ve got a 3D card (ATI Radeon, Matrox, etc.), contact him for instructions on testing.
UnixReview.com has an article on some miscellaneous tasks that can be accomplished with some clever shell scripting.
George Georgalis put together a little note on getting a cvsup daemon running.
The Handbook is at 828 7″x9″ pages, going by what Jeremy Reed produced. (Link goes to a PDF.)
Jeremy C. Reed, of bsdnewsletter.com fame, is the newest DragonFly committer, and has been tackling the dangerous task of documentation!
Chris Pressey announced a new version of the most excellent BSD Installer. Among other changes, it is rewritten in Lua, allows kernel module loading, gettext support, and … go read the announcement yourself.
The wiki has a HOWTO document on Icecasting on DragonFly, contributed by Adrian Nida.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert posted these steps for trying out gcc 4.0, which is in DragonFly but not yet part of the build process.
There’s 28 BSD projects in Google’s Summer of Code project. The 8 NetBSD-sponsored projects are already listed. (Thanks, Hubert Feyrer.)
The street where shiningsilence.com is hosted (my house) has been having electrical outages over the course of today; they’re lasting longer than my UPS can handle, so access may be intermittent if the power goes out again.
Chris Coleman has BSDUpdates.com, with free binary security upgrades for FreeBSD 5.3. There’s a good description on BSDNews about the service, though it doesn’t cover how it works in-depth. “BSDUpdates” suggests that this may be extended to the other BSDs at some point; it’d sure be handy for DragonFly once the development pace slows.
Sendmail 8.13.4 is in DragonFly, though I don’t know if it’s hooked into the build yet.
It’s a little late to mention this, because it’s either complete or close to complete, but Matthew Dillon and others have been removing SPL sections in code (there were more than 500 locations) and replacing them with critical sections. This is an important step on the road to Giant Lock-free SMP.
Joerg Sonnenberger is working on pkgsrc for DragonFly, as are a number of other developers; you can obtain his latest changes at: (Caveat emptor!)