The most recent quarterly release of pkgsrc is out; I’m building packages now on pkgbox.dragonflybsd.org and a full set of binaries should be available in about a week. (That’s how long it takes to build all 7,000 or so packages, even on good hardware…)
I link to this recent IPv6 bug report for DragonFly not because it’s a spectacular problem, but because it’s one of the most well-researched bug reports (including a fix!) that I’ve seen in a while. The originating issue is fixed, now.
There’s more details on Matthew Dillon’s HAMMER file system, specifically detailing B-Tree usage.
BSDTalk 132 is with the man on the other side of the fence: Richard Stallman.
Klaus Heinz is looking for Nagios plugin users on DragonFly, among other systems, for testing the newest versions. Be warned: Geert Hendrickx discovered a bug that affects NetBSD and probably also DragonFly in the latest version of Nagios. There’s a fix listed, and should hopefully be updated before it hits pkgsrc.
Ring ring ring ring ring ring ring BSDphone! Wired has a writeup on various smartphones that let you actually install software on the hardware you own, unlike some well-known examples. One of the phones mentioned is the Motorola A1200, or “Ming”, which is possibly BSD licensed open source code. Most of the pages that talk about it say “Linux-based”, so it may just be the translations, which are the only place I’ve seen BSD licensing mentioned so far.
Update: Poop. It’s just the translations. The operating system itself is a Linux 2.4 kernel.
Chris Turner posted some notes about hardware compatibility on AMD motherboards he’s used lately with DragonFly.
The (student) Association for Computing Machinery at the University of Illinois is holding their annual Reflections/Projections conference this weekend. It has the usual technical presentations about 3D rendering, system automation, and the like. However, it also has a good amount of BSD content. There’s an executive from Wind River Systems, which has had some history with FreeBSD, an OpenBSD presentation, and two cartoonists – Randall Munroe, of xkcd fame, and Phil & Kaja Foglio who create, among other things, Girl Genius. Phil Foglio happens to be the original artist who drew the BSD daemon.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for ‘Agere ET1310 based Ethernet chips (PCIe only)’, with the new et(4) driver.
Matthew Dillon is starting to commit parts of his HAMMER file system work; he anticipates it being available in beta form by the 2.0 release at the end of this year. He posted a design document, describing how it should work. Some highlights from my reading of it:
- Maximum size: half an exabyte
- Infinite snapshots, limited only by retention policy
- Streaming backups
- Asynchronous transactional support – no long fscks to check disk state
(Someone correct me if I’m summarizing inaccurately.) Some details from the ensuing discussion include comparisons with ZFS, RAID, and backups. KernelTrap also has a nice summary.
‘walt’ asked about the benefits of a tickless system. It would have some effect on system efficiency, and Constantine A. Murenin found it could make a measurable difference in power consumption
Welcome our newest committer: Thomas Nikolajsen.
Peter Avalos has updated less to version 4.0.8. I still never manage to think of this as a separate utility.
Also: He’s updated tcpdump to 3.9.8, libpcap to 0.9.8, and libarchive to 2.3.4. Thanks, Peter!
Aggelos Economopoulos is looking for opinions/compatibility stories on AMD hardware, as he’s shopping for a new system.
Hasso Tepper reports via #dragonflybsd his WinTec Pegasus ADD2 card works just fine under DragonFly. For those who are unfamiliar with this card, like me: it uses a PCI Express x16 slot to offer two additional DVI connections in addition to an existing Intel 915/945/965 chipset’s analog video output. Three video outputs, very cheaply.
A conversation about encrypted filesystems turned up some links on the topic from Chris Turner.
Dmitry Komissaroff has ported the uticom driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; it’s available at SourceForge and may get into the system too.
The next AsiaBSDCon will be in Tokyo, in March 2008. If you want to present a paper, the abstract is due on December 1st.
There is apparently a new version of Skype available that is expressly designed to run under Solaris/FreeBSD (download the static version) using Linux emulation. This may work on DragonFly, if it doesn’t require emulation of a Linux 2/6 kernel. (Thanks, Yair K.)
The latest FreeBSD status report notes that the Google Summer of Code project to port OpenBSD’s sensor framework to FreeBSD is successful, and also that it made it into DragonFly before it even came to FreeBSD. (via trevorjk on #dragonflybsd)