A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.
A number of recent changes will be important to you if you develop on DragonFly:
This has been around for a while, but I’m re-mentioning it because it’s not really linked anywhere: Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a version of the FreeBSD NVIDIA video driver that should work on DragonFly: http://gitweb.dragonflybsd.org/~corecode/nvidia.git. It should be possible to clone from that link, build the code, and use it. (Untested by me – if you’ve done it, some explicit instructions would be helpful to others.)
Alex Hornung has ported FreeBSD’s kbdmux, making it possible to run multiple keyboards. This can help if a system has a built-in virtual keyboard, as some newer HPs do.
Dear universe, including DragonFly people: stop doing so much stuff. It’s hard to keep up.
Alexander Polakov has ported the ae(4) network driver from FreeBSD to DragonFly; it’s committed now. This device is common in some (many?) Asus Eee devices.
Dru Lavigne is going to be doing blogging/tweeting for the FreeBSD Project and FreeBSD Foundation. This is a good thing – BSD in general is helped by more of a conversation about what’s going on. I daresay this Digest has established that there’s definitely enough events, just with DragonFly, for daily news.
Also, Dru’s published summaries of the articles in the upcoming July ‘Collaboration’ issue of the Open Source Business Resource.
Hasso Tepper has added the open source HAL code for ath(4) (old man page), as suggested by Alexander Polakov. I’m not sure if this is related to Dmitry Komissaroff’s work.
Sepherosa Ziehau’s bwi(4) driver for DragonFly is going into FreeBSD 8, as mentioned in this Warner Losh blog post.
The newest BSDTalk has a conversation from BSDCan 2009 with 5 different FreeBSD core team members, for 38 minutes.
Mashing together to make one post:
FreeBSD-SA-09:05.telnet and FreeBSD-SA-09:07.libc have been fixed in DragonFly.
These PC-BSD 7.1 vs. Kubuntu 9.04 Benchmarks are interesting but not that conclusive – different versions of gcc were used. (thanks J. Kanowitz) Here’s a different comparison of performance inside a VM from Ivan Voras.
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.
Hasso Tepper has updated the DRM code (from FreeBSD) with some caveats.
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.
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.
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.
Oliver Fromme has a new bootloader for FreeBSD and DragonFly. He’s added the DragonFly logo, and it looks neat. Can someone test this on physical hardware?
Freddie Cash has an interesting writeup of how he put together a very capable and cheap backup system using ZFS; this is part of a larger discussion on Hammer, ZFS, performance and solutions.
A vulnerability in telnetd code common to FreeBSD and DragonFly was just discovered; it’s been fixed in DragonFly using code from NetBSD in 1995, strangely enough. (via #dragonflybsd on EFNet)
The FreeBSD Foundation is looking to give people money to work. (pdf) Specifically, they have USD $30K to give to people wanting to work on FreeBSD subsystems. Fight global recession!
EuroBSDCon 2009 is being held September 18-19th in Cambridge, UK. That’s a long way off, but they just opened their call for papers.
Art & Code is March 7th, at Carnegie Mellon. “Programming for Artists” – it’s cheap, and the output should be interesting. (via)
