Sascha Wildner has synced find(1) with what’s in FreeBSD, which means there’s a lot more options available – see the commit for details. Many of them are for GNU compatibility, and I’m sure I’ll forget them all. I seem to have issues remembering how to use find(1) successfully.
Sepherosa Ziehau has added netblast, a tool originally from FreeBSD that, if I’m reading the commit right, flings packets of a given size at an IP/port of your choosing, for as long as you want.
A few recent updates imported to DragonFly from FreeBSD: Francois Tigeot updated amdsbwd(4), an AMD south bridge watchdog. Sascha Wildner updated arcmsr(4), the Areca RAID controller driver, and Peter Avalos updated pw(8).
In the other direction, FreeBSD now has GNU hash support for rtld, based on John Marino’s work in DragonFly.
It’s now possible to specify a jail ID when using pgrep and pkill(1), to capture processes specific to a jail. It’s similar to the same option in FreeBSD, except no compatibility issues since this option did not previously exist in DragonFly.
Michael Lucas installed WHMCS, a commerical hosting management tool, on FreeBSD. He tells a story of doing so, and in the process happened to list all the PHP modules needed for it to run. I’m linking it because that list is going to come in useful for someone, someday.
Sascha Wildner has brought in improvements to the mps(4)driver from FreeBSD. It’s for LSI Logic Fusion-MPT 2 SAS controllers, and apparently didn’t work very well… until now. Sascha’s commit message details what’s new, including RAID support that is not yet mentioned in the man page.
Deb Goodkin of the FreeBSD Foundation gets 24 minutes of interview on BSDTalk.
Since I’m already talking about imports, several changes from FreeBSD and OpenBSD for NFS, plus more original material, have been brought in by Venkatesh Srinivas. Those changes from FreeBSD apparently improve NFS write performance, though I don’t have numbers to show.
The FreeBSD Foundation is putting out their end of year donation notice. Donate if you can; the support for active developers there helps everyone.
Adrian Chadd showed up on the DragonFly kernel@ mailing list, offering some help in keeping things compatible with FreeBSD and 802.11 networking. That’s quite neighborly of him, especially since his hands are already pretty full.
Yep, fall hits and it’s easier to find links.
- DragonFly morphology. The insect, not the operating system, though that would make an interesting diagram.
- Stick your pinkie in the corner of your mouth, Dr. Evil style, and say, “One MEEELion TCP connections on BSD!“. (via several retweets)
- Sudo vs. SSH public keys.
- The app store concept is taking over. Not that it’s a totally bad thing! We could implement one for pkgsrc, and should. (via)
- A nice (OpenBSD-centric) walkthrough of routing. (via)
- Ooh, decent disk benchmarks. I wish there were graphs, of course.
- I think this happens to most CS grads; you sit around one day and say to yourself, “Hey, I could write an operating system!” This forum post shows someone getting that idea and then realizing it’s not necessarily the goal he wanted. Why do I link to it? I appreciate the optimism.
- Or you can just build a functioning computer in Minecraft. This sort of thing has been happening for a while – this movie is just a link to the craziest example I’ve seen so far.
Your unrelated link of the week: Scientific Illustration. Not a comic, but still visually interesting.
If you have a HighPoint RocketRAID 4321 or 4322 model, Sascha Wildner’s just added support for them in the hptiop(4) driver, taken from FreeBSD.
Remember the benchmark tests I linked a few days ago? There’s been ongoing discussion about them, and a recent comment from Matthew Dillon sums it up pretty well: the benchmarks differ depending on whether you favor reads, or favor writes.
Francois Tigeot tested a system under both FreeBSD and DragonFly using various RAID setups with arcmsr(4) and blogbench. Hooray for graphs! Like any good benchmark, it quickly went to discussion of how the test was conducted and how the various runs differ. (Follow the thread.)
Google’s announced the accepted projects for 2011. DragonFly has 6 slots!
We had a large number of interesting project proposals; far more than than the slots available. If you’re one of the students who did not get in, please consider working on your project as time allows. I know it won’t be lucrative, but I’d still like to see them happen.
Here’s the list of accepted projects:
- Implementing a mirror target for device mapper: Adam Hoka, mentored by Joe Talbott
- Improve dsched interfaces and implement BFQ disk scheduling policy: Brills Peng, mentored by Alex Hornung
- Make vkernels checkpointable: Irina Presa, mentored by Venkatesh Srinivas
- Port PUFFS from NetBSD/FreeBSD: nickprok, mentored by Nathaniel Filardo
- Bring kernel event notification in DragonFly BSD to its logical conclusion: Samuel J. Greear, mentored by Sascha Wildner
- Porting Virtio Drivers from NetBSD to DragonFly BSD to speed up DragonFly BSD as a KVM guest: Stéphanie Ouillon, mentored by Pratyush Kshirsagar
February’s BSD Magazine is headlining “ZFS on FreeBSD”, along with a bunch of other material, including an interview/example for the next BSDCan convention. There’s some BSD-project-specific news in there from this site about DragonFly, along with MirOS, MidnightBSD, and FreeBSD.
Peter Avalos went looking for updates to /bin/sh, and found a lot of them, including regression tests. Even though sh is… 15 years old? Older? It dates back to BSD 4.4 and before – anyway, it’s been around forever, but there’s still things to do with it.
Sascha Wildner is continuing his huge driver-adding streak, this time with tws(4). It’s a port of the FreeBSD driver, for “LSI 3ware 9750 series SATA/SAS RAID controllers”. The commit message has a list of individual models, and further credits.