jgarcia, on #dragonflybsd (EFNet), posted a link to this interesting IBM developerWorks story talking about the many types and small variation of Unix standards. Note to self: read developerWorks more often.
Miguel Filipe posted a link to a paper (slides) on speeding up the Linux network stack. The answers: It’s been discussed, and while the approach could sometimes affect speed, it doesn’t solve an actual problem, and introduces far more complexity (and therefore bugs) than it’s worth.
Sascha Wildner posted that due to spam on wiki.dragonflybsd.org, he’s only allowing known people to modify the wiki, which should only affect you if you’re a dirty, bottom-feeding, no-good spammer.
BSDTalk has an interview up with Matthew Dillon, where he talks about his goals with the DragonFly BSD Project, and makes some good points about application availability.
There’s a good pile of other useful interviews at the BSDTalk site; I did not know of any of this before. Browsing through the past interviews, I see mention of FreeBSD-based FreeNAS, a free network attached storage solution, which is also new to me. (Reminds me of the now-defunct DataHive servers…)
Liam J. Foy’s BSD Portal, which aggregates a large number of BSD headlines, has been moved to a new location: http://liamjfoy.freeshell.org/
A recently discovered tip: if you want to build world somewhere else, you need to set the right environment variables.
Slashdot linked to a IBM Developerworks story about SCTP, a recent addition to the Linux 2.6 kernel. Yeah, we’ve got that too.
Jeremy C. Reed has gone through quite an ordeal getting FreeBSD, NetBSD and DragonFly to all boot on his laptop. Check this thread to read the process, to the happy conclusion.
Terry Tree has been working on porting the FreeBSD hybrid scheduler; he’d like some input as the merging has been difficult.
#dragonflybsd denizen jgarcia passed along a link to this Linux.com article on “Viewing Word files at the command line“. The article says Linux, but there’s nothing really Linux-specific, as it covers various Word alternatives that are all available in pkgsrc.
Matthew Dillon’s commited a large quantity of bug fixes back to the 1.4 release tag today, and if no problems arise, 1.4.2 will be released.
William Grim is proposing to use DragonFly in his master’s thesis, where he writes a framework for user-space device drivers. Matthew Dillon and Emiel Kollof had some interesting feedback.
For those who like their console a little more roomy, vidcontrol is a way to fit smaller/different text onto your console screen immediately on startup. Attention to >font and LCD use is a good idea.
Curious about where to place rc scripts from pkgsrc? Joerg Sonneberger says where to stick them.
There’s a new mailing list – pkgsrc-users@netbsd.org – specifically for people using pkgsrc packages. tech-pkg@netbsd.org is now for packagers. To subscribe, send ‘subscribe pkgsrc-users’ to majordomo@netbsd.org.
Pkgsrc questions should generally go to this new list, though DragonFly-specific questions should be asked on users@dragonflybsd.org first. (Unless, of course, the package doesn’t build yet on DragonFly.)
Interestingly, the number of actual broken pkgsrc packages is down to only 10% of the entire collection. Much credit is due to Joerg Sonnenberger, Jeremy C. Reed, and others, for knocking this quantity down.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has a patch that provides a new binary kgdb along with other features, and he needs testers before it gets committed.
Greg Lehey’s big book, “The Complete FreeBSD”, is now available as a PDF and as a set of source files under a Creative Commons license, meaning anyone can download, update, and submit back changes. This was the first book ever on FreeBSD, and it’s a big ‘un.
Chris Buechler and Scott Ullrich are giving a talk at BSDCan about various firewalling technologies on BSD systems, including DragonFly.
I’m going to try to make it to this event, too…
Chuck Tuffli is working on an implementation of MSI for DragonFly. MSI is a way for device drivers to talk, similar to but better than the old IRQ method. As Chuck kindly explained it to me, MSI and MSI-X are necessary for PCI-Express support.
UnixReview.com has two noow book reviews up: Pro Perl Debugging, which should have obvious uses, and Math You Can’t Use, for those who want to feel bad about copyright.