A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
The due date for the Summer of Code proposals is past, and DragonFly has 18 proposals. The consensus from other SoC organizations is the same: less applicants everywhere this year, but the proposal quality is up.
Potential mentors can now discuss the proposals and ask for more detail from the students, until April 15th.
19:00 UTC today is the deadline for all student applications for Google’s Summer of Code program. You can revise applications up to April 15th based on feedback, but the initial proposal has to be in the system as of tonight. That’s 5 hours from now, if I have my time calculations correct.
DragonFly has 15 applications at this point, and general application quality looks to be better this year than last.
Matthew Dillon and Jordan Gordeev have done further work on AMD64 support; it’s progressing quickly. Check that first link for a hint on how to install correct boot code.
This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues. Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly. Another side of his story has come to light. He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.
It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.
Hammer’s ‘undo’ now has the ability to index and automatically diff historical versions of files for you, thanks to a patch from Joel K. Pettersson. (He’s got more ideas, too.
Mathtew Dillon has added an automatic building and testing environment for AMD64 support. This one command will build an entire boot image, along with qemu to run it in, though some issues with compiling qemu remain. (Related)
Hasso Tepper has updated the DRM code (from FreeBSD) with some caveats.
Please welcome our newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Stathis Kamperis
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a student working on a Linux port of Hammer. This will lead to a breakout of Hammer from the DragonFly tree, too.
Peter Avalos has a large number of changes to libc in his tree. He’d like to have other eyeballs looking at them, so please read over and comment.
There is, of course, DragonFly project ideas for Google’s Summer of Code. There are also idea pages up for FreeBSD and NetBSD, both also participating this year.
Thanks to Archimedes Gaviola, I’ve changed out the slide presentations (that didn’t work) on the Presentations page.
I’ve also linked all 5 BSDTalk interviews of Matthew Dillon on that page – previously, only one was linked there.
Not only is Hasso Tepper doing regular bulk builds as he fixes up more pkgsrc packages for DragonFly, he’s also posting diffs that show progress. (Every line prefixed with a – is another working package.)
Dmitry Komissaroff has posted a port of wlan, ath_hal and if_ath from FreeBSD. It’s not finished because he lacks the hardware. If you’ve got the hardware, the inclination, or both, please assist.
If you’d like to mentor for DragonFly, as several people have expressed interest, sign yourself up at the Summer of Code site and request mentoring for DragonFly. If you sign up before the 23rd, when students can start applying, you’ll get added to the private mentors mailing list.
DragonFly BSD is a participating organization in Google’s Summer of Code 2009. (See the lists of participating organizations at the Google site.)
I have an announcement message with more details on the mailing lists; the next important date is the 23rd, when students can apply. If you’re a student, start putting your proposal together and talking with others. If you can mentor, sign yourself up on the Google site and request a mentoring spot.
Alex Hornung has done some preliminary work with llvm/clang, and has successfully compiled a GENERIC DragonFly kernel, and completed a buildworld, using it. He also has some very nice notes available detailing the work. There’s potential for cross-BSD work with FreeBSD on this one, too.
If you’re using growisofs (or K3b) to burn your DVDs and having some trouble, here’s some tips that may get it working.
Matthew Dillon has added a “rebalance” feature to Hammer, which cleans up the underlying B-Tree structures in Hammer that might otherwise slow down searching. It’s considered experimental, so be careful with it for now.
While these details have probably been explained before, Matthew Dillon has a nice summary of how the vkernel system works, for your weekend reading.