The Google Summer of Code midterms are coming up, which generally means students get graded on a pass/fail basis for their work so far, and both mentors and students fill out surveys. What’s this mean? It means we’re halfway through six projects!
If you’re running a recent version of DragonFly 2.11, it’s worth updating. Matthew Dillon fixed a networking bug that I’ve seen cause problems. It was introduced within 2.11’s lifetime, so as far as I know, this won’t affect anyone on 2.10.
The latest quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q2, has been branched. There’s no formal announcement yet to describe the highlights, but I’ll link it when it shows up. I’ve already started building binary packages for DragonFly 2.10 and 2.11.
I happened to stumble on this: the DuckDuckGo search engine will take you directly to a DragonFly man page, if you type ‘!dfman’ at the start of your query. For instance, “!dfman hammer“.
Sascha Wildner has enabled the CPU_ENABLE_EST option for x86_64 kernels. If you’re on x86_64, you can now use Enhanced Speedstep Technology. (i386 users already could.)
Sepherosa Ziehau has a firmware update for bce(4) (Broadcom NetXtreme II) cards. He’s been doing a lot more incidental network hardware updates I haven’t linked; thanks, Sephe!
I digress mightily this week, so I’m not doing the bullet points.
You probably heard of this already, but hey, look! DragonFly BSD, ubersearched.
Along with all the other Google announcements recently, there’s the Data Liberation Front. This, I bet, is the one product that only Google creates.
While on that whole topic, I see ads now that contain a URL on Facebook rather than the product’s website itself. It makes me think of years ago, when commercials would list the “AOL Keyword” for people to look up. Yeah, that worked out just dandy. There’s a similar perspective that goes for writers (via).
The Eternal Shame of Your First Online Handle. (via lots of places) Here’s my story. It was, and still is, “Fupjack”. Years and years ago, a friend of mine had a friend named Zack. Zack was interesting like a car accident; he was famous for screaming “Give a hoot! Don’t pollute!” and flinging a Big Gulp drink into oncoming traffic while driving down the highway. He also destroyed both front tires of his car by ramming a parking lot median at 40mph.
Anyway, apparently he yelled something rude at a woman at some public event, and what she yelled back sounded like “something something fupjack!” I wasn’t there, but from then on, “fupjack” was the default name we’d use whenever we needed one. People certainly mispronounce it in interesting ways…
The July issue of BSD Magazine is out. The putative theme is “BSD Security”, but there also happens to be an article featuring Hammer deduplication on real-world data, by yours truly.
I posted before about changes to the commit template for DragonFly, but Alex Hornung has written up exactly what he did, with better details on how to use it.
Sepherosa Ziehau has been committing a bunch of changes for em/emx(4) and bce(4). You may have hardware that has suddenly become supported, for instance. Also, credit is due to David Christensen and Broadcom for sending hardware to test out.
Juan Francisco Cantero Hurtado really wants a port of DragonFly to Xen. He can’t do it himself, but he did a nice job of writing up the problem, and even found resources to help any developer wanting to take on this task.
Two completely separate and unrelated changes:
First, Alex Hornung has added a check to look for certain lines in a commit message, and add a MFC reminder note to the commit message if they are found. MFC, if you haven’t heard it, means ‘merge from current’, or moving a change from dragonfly-current to the last release version.
Second, with the next quarterly release of pkgsrc coming up, there’s some old packages that will get dropped. Speak up if you need them to stick around.
If you’ve had a lack of emails from the DragonFly mailing lists lately, this SORBS listing event might be why.
Do you have a Intel PRO/Wireless 2200BG, 2225BG, or 2915ABG wireless card? The driver is iwi(4). It requires a kernel module and some downloadable firmware, which makes it slightly more troublesome to set up. Luckily, ‘ferz’ has written up just how to get it working.
Jeremy Chadwick donated an SSD to DragonFly developer ‘josepht’. Thanks, Jeremy!
Normally I’d take this moment to point out the other donations that could be useful for DragonFly developers… but there doesn’t seem to be any pending requests. Anyone working on a hardware driver that needs something physical to test against? Here’s the moment to note that.
There’s an update on Stéphanie Ouillon’s Google Summer of Code project, working on the virtio block device driver.
Pkgsrc bmake bootstrap, that is. There’s a new version of bmake, and it needs to be tested on every platform possible.
Matthew Dillon has made some changes to AHCI support; if you have an Intel motherboard with an SSD drive that occasionally doesn’t want to co-operate on a cold boot, this recent update may fix it.
Do you have a Via CPU? Do you use padlock(4)? (The driver for cryptographic functions, which Via processors support with hardware acceleration) Alex Hornung made some untested changes to support the hardware random number generator, but he needs people to test it.