EuroBSDCon 2008 just concluded in Strasbourg, France. Audio (pick Formation: EuroBSDCon) and pictures from the talks are now available; check out Constantine Murenin;s talk on the OpenBSD sensors framework, as DragonFly shares that code. (via Hasso Tepper on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
Matthew Dillon’s added support for kqueue in Hammer; as part of that, he’s added a new ‘monitor‘ utility. If you’re curious about what kqueue is, look at the FreeBSD, NetBSD, and Mac OS X versions. Edit: and of course, the DragonFly version.
Hardware checksum support has been added to the re(4) (RealTek) driver by Sepherosa Ziehau, for the 8102E, 8102EL, 8168C, 8168CP and 8168D chipsets. He’s been committing a lot of other work too – this was just the easiest to summarize.
The OpenBSD Journal has a number of interesting news items, so I’m just going to list the links and titles of each. All worth reading.
- Cross-site request forgery via ftpd(8) – don’t know if this is present in DragonFly or not
- OpenGL has been relicensed
- Will Backman’s Day 1 summary for NYCBSDCon
- Ian Darwin talks about getting OpenBSD on a ‘netbook’ – I still want one of these little laptops, even though I don’t need it.
Hasso Tepper, who has been committing a number of laptop-related fixes lately, has added a page to the DragonFly wiki with some tips on how to reduce power usage and heat on your DragonFly laptop.
I don’t normally link to Windows-bashing here for various reasons, but this parody of Windows 7 is darn good.
The Call For Papers for AsiaBSDCon 2009 is out. It’s being held in Tokyo, the 12th to 15th of March.
Both Matthias Schmidt and Sascha Wildner drew attention to a rconfig(8) script now in DragonFly 2.1 that, when used off a LiveCD (and modified for any differences in disk setup) will create a UFS /boot and a Hammer /everything-else.
Matthias Schmidt has added a number of DragonFly-specific tips to the fortune file; these will be visible on login or if you run fortune dragonfly-tips (on a bleeding edge system, of course)
As mentioned previously, DragonFly’s included BIND could use the ability to be compiled with DNSSEC support, after Jeremy C. Reed’s DNSSEC presentation at NYCBSDCon. (.mp3) Jeremy’s kindly provided a patch for just that.
The other presentations from NYCBSDCon are not yet online, but Jason Dixon’s “BSD vs. GPL” is available now on his site as an mp4 file and also at Google Video. (via comments here)
Do you have a Realtek 8101E card? Are you running bleeding edge DragonFly? If so, Sepherosa Ziehau would like you to test out his recent changes.
Edwin Groothuis pointed out in a blog post that FreeBSD’s ino_t type being 32 bit, not 64 bit, was a major obstacle to having Hammer on FreeBSD. He also noted that there’s some work that may change that.
Hasso Tepper has added (based on this FreeBSD work) the ability to “parse the utrace(2) entries generated by malloc(3) in a more human-readable format”.
The most recent branch of pkgsrc, 2008Q3, is available now.
The audio from NYCBSDCon presentations is available thanks to Nikolai Fetissov. Matthew Dillon’s Hammer presentation audio is available, along with others. I’ll link to the video/slides as soon as they are available. An idea of what Jason Dixon’s “BSD versus GPL” (,mp3) may be like as video can be gleaned from his previous work: BSD is Dying (Google Video, via).
Matthew Dillon also points out on his return from NYCBSDCon that some of the funding behind various BSD projects and developers comes from the financial institutions melting down recently; DragonFly is, luckily, unaffected.
(my IRA lost “only” 15% on Friday. Yeesh.)
Sascha Wildner is updating DragonFly to tzcode2008g, which will modernize our time system, along with making 64-bit time_t possible. It also apparently fixes a recently reported problem in Python. Sascha links to this time page in his message, with more time zone link information than ever I’ve seen.
Oh, and Sascha updated timezone data, too.
BSDTalk 161 has 25 minutes of streamed audio from Sunday’s NYCBSDCon session.
BSDTalk 160 is a longer-than-usual 40 minutes of audio right from NYCBSDCon. An interesting listen, especially if like me you wanted to go, but didn’t. (Stupid expensive NYC hotels…)