A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
YONETANI Tomokazu got a letter from folks at JMicron, looking for someone to work on driver support for their drive controllers under DragonFly. Interested?
While on that topic, Matthew Dillon wrote some notes about device driver writing and the example driver code.
Joerg Sonnenberger forwarded along the announcement that the first quarterly release of pkgsrc for 2006 is out. Notably, there’s nearly 6,000 packages, and these two interesting tips:
As always, we’d like to encourage users of the packages collection to install and run pkgsrc/security/audit-packages at least every day – this will provide notification of any packages which are vulnerable to exploit.
We’d also really appreciate it if people would install the pkgsrc/pkgtools/pkgsurvey package, and then run the pkgsurvey script for us. This will forward us a list of the packages installed on that machine, and the operating system and release level of the operating system. The results will be kept confidential, but the output will help us analyse the packages that are most used.
Daemon News has an interview of OpenBSD’s Theo deRaadt, where he mentions DragonFly. The last response in the interview is also entertaining.
BSDTalk has a new interview up with Liam Foy, who is porting CARP to NetBSD, created BSDPortal.org, and (most importantly!) also contributes to DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon posted a description of his near-term work that will get us closer to the vaunted Cache Coherency Management System and, incidentally, userspace VFS.
“walt” posted about the upcoming change from 512-byte to 4-kbyte sector size on disks. Apparently, this won’t cause problems.
This week on UnixReview.com: Regular Expressions: Experience Teaches Lessons for Team Projects, Certification: Test Your Knowledge of Wireless Security, Book Review: Nessus, Snort and Ethereal Power Tools, and a review of kdissert.
My fault: the Goals section on the DragonFly BSD website is now moved to a single page under Docs.
Matthew Dillon has removed NQNFS; normal NFSv2/NFSv3 will still work, which is probably the NFS flavors everyone would be using anyway…
Robert Sebastian Gerus found that it is possible to see filenames after deletions, which is an outgrowth of UFS (and a number of other filesystems). If this concerns you, use rm -P to overwrite the data before marking it unused.
IBM developerWorks has a nice article up (by Chris Herborth, former BeOS dev) on using Eclipse as an IDE even with non-Java projects.
New device support is always good: Sepherosa Ziehau and Sascha Wildner have put together a driver for TI acx100/acx111 wireless network cards. It’s been tested with D-Link 520 and 650 cards. (that’s my guess on the product links, there.)
Assuming nobody finds a problem, it’ll be in the system in a week.
The release version of DragonFly has been brought to 1.4.3 to incorporate the recent Sendmail security update, among other things. Bleeding edge code has been brought up to version 1.5.2, because Matthew Dillon has added (after the bump) his potentially destabilizing BUF/BIO code. If you like running Preview, update and plan to stick with it a while until this new technology gets sorted out.
Sascha Wildner sent along a link to “The Daemon, the GNU & the Penguin“, a many-part history of Unix.
Several FreeBSD security issues were found recently that also apply to DragonFly: ipsec (DragonFly fix), opie (DragonFly fix), and sendmail (DragonFly fix). The fix for sendmail incidentally brings it to version 8.13.6. David Rhodus has also started to bring in some applicable changes from NetBSD found by the Coverity scan. (Coverity is apparently not accepting any new source collections to scan at this time, so we don’t get it directly.)
Joerg Sonnenberger, who has been fixing a ridiculous number of pkgsrc packages to run on DragonFly, is giving a presentation at PkgSrcCon. The convention is happening May 5-7, in Paris. The registration deadline is April 15th, by the way.
A recent post on undeadly.org highlights the need for OpenBSD to find new funding sources to support the various hackathons held around the world for OpenBSD. It appears that the normal funding source, selling CDs of each release of OpenBSD, has become much less lucrative. OpenBSD also has a donations page.
With the growth of broadband access, the need to order a separate CD has dwindled. It appears the OpenBSD Project is going to have to supply some different form of services in order to continue the same revenue stream. According to the article, they previously generated US $80,000 each year for the last two years, and still came up $20,000 short.
Along the same lines, the FreeBSD Foundation is accepting donations. According to the most recent newsletter, the Foundation is doing well enough that a part-time administrator has been brought in to handle affairs. The most recent Foundation newsletter does not describe their financial status in specific terms, other than to sound positive. The newsletter for 2004 shows a small loss.
NetBSD also has a non-profit Foundation, with donations possible. The most recent financial report for the NetBSD foundation shows a positive balance, and recent newsletters show 2005 went well.
What about DragonFly? DragonFly is not yet a non-profit, so there’s no direct place for donations to go, though there are requests for equipment that can be filled. Pretty much all costs for dragonflybsd.org come out of Matthew Dillon’s pocket. Given the relatively huge size of these other project’s budgets, Dragonfly appears to be doing well.
Sven Willenberger saw some odd “cache_lock” messages; these are relatively benign.
The links for the old RSS/XML news feeds for this site now redirect to the new feed locations.
Francis Gudin, I think it is, posted a link on his GoBSD blog to Dave Glowacki’s GCC warnings.