A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
There’s been a number of people reporting various breakages during install or boot time. To weed out problems caused by old data right away, remember to:
rm -rf /usr/obj
make buildworld
make buildkernel
make installkernel
make installworld
mergemaster
reboot
Matt Dillon added an “upcall mechanism to support userland LWKT”. You can look at the man page for upc_register in source.
In a followup to the K42 post, Max Laier pointed at the L4Ka project, which is somewhat similar in scope.
Michal Ostrowski, a developer with the K42 project at IBM Research, posted to dragonfly.kernel and noted that DragonFly and K42 are very similar in design and could benefit from interaction. He brought up several papers located on their site: a K42 overview, K42 and traditional UNIX APIs, and K42’s threading and scheduling infrastructure. The closely-related Tornado operating system also has some good information.
I’ve been playing too much Day of Defeat; I see ‘KAR98‘ every time I read K42. The project’s not about a teutonic WW2 rifle, though – the name K42 has a different origin.
Jeroen Ruigrok pointed out this Newsforge article that says SCO will probably be bringing the AT&T settlement over BSD into court. According to people’s opinions, however, this is a last legal flailing, rather than anything that will significantly affect BSD-derived systems like DragonFly.
Daemonnews also has a mention of this, where Marc Rassbach points out the article’s author has a ‘poison pen’ history vs. BSD products, and Peter Hansteen notes a Forbes article on SCO, this Byte article, and the ever-bearded Greg Lehey’s excellent appraisal of this mess.
I’ve corrected my how-to-install writeup, based on what several people said in dragonfly.kernel. Several steps are now removed, but it still has the same flavor.
According to Matt Dillon, DragonFly will skip the multiple branch style of FreeBSD (STABLE, CURRENT branches) and tag the single main branch, slipping as needed for security fixes.
Aaaand it’s done – rebuilding your system with current sources will give you a uname that reports “DragonFly”. Through some trickery, most ports are apparently not broken by this.
Matt Dillon’s bringing in the ‘DragonFly’ name to replace ‘FreeBSD’ in the source, which may break a number of things over the next few days, including all ports.
Jeroen Ruigrok suggested the Sun Grid Engine (FreeBSD version) as a project for anyone with time on their hands.
Joshua Coombs asked about good books for BSD kernel/network programming. Jeroen Ruigrok listed: “The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD”, “Unix Internals: The New Frontiers”, and “The Design of the Unix Operating System”.
From Joshua Coombs:
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The make release step no longer depends on perl, thanks to Jeroen Ruigrok.
Yet more __P() macros have been removed. Check the commits record around the 13th to see. __P() should now be gone most everywhere except contrib.
We had some power outages/surges here because of a windstorm, and my UPS didn’t handle it well, along with other local network equipment. So, I’ll be slow with news posts until I get my internal network in better working order.
Matt Dillon noted he would be creating a port override for gcc33, as the port from FreeBSD’s port tree doesn’t seem to work just right.
I’ll quote Matt Dillon’s entry cause I’m working late:
” The MBWTest program (/tmp/mbw1) attempts to figure out the L1 and L2 cache sizes and measures L1, L2, and non-cached linear memory bandwidth.”
Joshua Coombs is kicking around the idea of modeling – or even implementing – his new routing model, in Perl.
This week Matt Dillon is doing:
For those of you late to the party and wondering why his work schedule is spotlighted, Matt Dillon is the originator of the DragonFly project, and is doing much heavy lifting.