The USENIX 2007 Technical Conference will be on June 17th-22nd of this year, and early bird registration is due June 1st. There’s a number of ‘BSD People’ there, as speakers.
Apparently virtual kernels are useful no matter the operating system. (Thanks, somebody I lost the name of on #dragonflybsd)
A recent discussion of RAID cards revealed some known working 3ware models, plus the fact that Matthew Dillon plans to duplicate some RAID functionality at the filesystem level, probably by the end of the year.
Sendmail 8.14.1 is now tied into the codebase by Gregory Neil Shapiro; your milters may need recompilation if you are following DragonFly’s bleeding edge code. Also, binutils 2.17 has been added by Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert.
XFCE 4.4 is available now in pkgsrc; it was in the wip/ branch until recently. If you want to contribute, you can test and package up the various available plugins for xfce.
Gregory Neil Shapiro has imported the Sendmail 8.14.1 source into DragonFly, but it’s not yet linked into the build. If you want to test it, there’s a patch available; otherwise it will be linked in soon.
LWN.net has an article up on DragonFly’s vkernel system, and this looks to be the first of several articles. (Thanks, Hasso Tepper in #dragonflybsd)
cvsup is an excellent program, allowing retrievals of file revisions from a cvsup server. It’s been traditionally used in FreeBSD and DragonFly to get updates to the system source… However, cvsup requires a working version of Modula-3 to build, and the C-based replacement, csup, can’t run as a server. Rsync is a common alternative that also offers good performance.
I did a comparison of the two, repeatedly running partial and full downloads from a DragonFly mirror that supplied the same data via both protocols. I posted the results, and dragonflybsd.org is now offering files via rsync.
Matthew Dillon posted a roundup on the status of his work on the SYSLINK protocol, and his plans for the new Hammer filesystem and Anvil storage system. He’s added a new ‘alist’ bitmap allocator to assist with this. I daresay he’s feeling a strong desire for a new filesystem about now, too…
There’s an oft-quoted Perlism: “There’s More Than One Way to Do It”. Today’s example of that is the question: “How do you see what network ports are being used by a given application?“ Turns out there’s at least three different ways to find out.
I spoke too soon – Peter Avalos has updated us to libarchive 2.0.28.
Peter Avalos has updated libarchive to version 2.0.27.
Joerg Sonnenberger has created a new source of binary pkgsrc packages for DragonFly. He has packages up now built with modular xorg, and will have a new batch up soon using the upcoming quarterly release of pkgsrc.
If you’re feeling generous, he could use another 4G of RAM – model number is given in his message.
pkgsrcCon 4 is in Barcelona, Spain from April 27 – 29, 2007. Be warned: there’s only 2 days left to register!
On UnixReview.com: “Test Your Knowledge of Regular Expressions and Shell Basics“, a book review of “Scripting VMware Power Tools“, and a product review of Komodo 4.0.
pkgsrc now has the new modular version of xorg. There isn’t yet a single meta-package to pull it all in as there was for monolithic xorg, but you can find the packages pretty easily by just looking at what Joerg Sonnenberger is working on. If you want to build packages using this latest version, set ‘X11_VERSION=modular’ in your mk.conf file. (Thanks to Joerg for cluing me in to this.)
Someone want to get DRI/DRM working? NetBSD just started getting it together, and it would be handy to take advantage of some of the xorg features with it.
Mike Wolman posted some benchmarks using a virutal kernel, and Matthew Dillon followed up with an explanation on what affects speed in the virtual environment.
Matthew Dillon has written up some details of how he wants the syslink protocol to deal with a variety of situations, like asymmetrical bandwidth, or having to discover the network path when the state of the network is changing or broken. I see some similarities with other successful protocols you may have heard of.
Steve O’Hara-Smith has managed to get nspluginwrapper working. This program acts as a wrapper for FireFox plugins compiled for other platforms, most notably Flash. The changes have been submitted (and already included!) upstream into pkgsrc, but you can get details from him now, if desired.