Category: Goings-on

Low on time, so it’s all mushed together:

Joerg Sonneberger has an explanation of RSA vs. DSA encryption. Unixreview.com has two useful articles – how to test a new version of MySQL without disturbing your current install and a book review of “Advanced Unix Programming”. And, oh yeah – ntpdate is gone – use rdate.

Chuck Tuffli has ported the fxp (Intel Etherexpress network card) driver that uses bus_dma, and so should be very speedy. Andrew Atrens ported the iwi driver, for the Intel(R) PRO/Wireless 2200BG MiniPCI. Both are looking for testers.

Robert Watson posted some plans about SMP on FreeBSD. It’s interesting to contrast it with what’s planned for DragonFly, and how well the changes affect single and multiprocessor performance. (thanks BSDNews).

George Georgalis posted a link to a “Considered Harmful” article – this time, it’s recursive make.

MAtthew Dillon created a spot in the docs to note which laptops work with DragonFly – due to the custom hardware in most laptops, it can be hit or miss for many laptops and non-Windows operating systems. While talking about his IBM r32 (which works), Paul Grunwald suggested the site off-leasecomputers.com as a laptop source.

On kernel@, Antonio Vargas brought up the splice() I/O model planned for the Linux kernel.

Slashdot/BSD has a story on Sun revoking the Java license for FreeBSD, which is not a surprise to anyone who saw mention of this in December’s FreeBSD Foundation newsletter. (Admittedly, it was overshadowed by the non-corporation donation needs.) The real answer is that the license expired because of a SNAFU rather than a desire by Sun to end Java use on FreeBSD, and it’s getting worked out. This affects DragonFly to some extent, since Java can be built from the port system DragonFly inherited from FreeBSD.

A fellow named Gregory McGarry has written a paper showing NetBSD outperforming FreeBSD 5 on a number of benchmarks. These would be more accurately called microbenchmarks, as the paper describes very specific system activities, repeated. It would be interesting to repeat with DragonFly – and it could be done, as the paper includes details on how to repeat. The benchmark is similar to an earlier BSD and Linux comparison done more than a year ago. (seen on BSDNews)

‘walt’ posted a question about how makefile variables interoperate, for which Max Okumoto wrote a detailed explanation.

Guillermo Garcia Rojas has completed a Spanish translation of the DragonFly FAQ.

Zera William Holladay is due credit for filling Emiel Kollof’s donation request for hard drives on the DragonFly Donations page. Consider donating, if you have something that matches.

Newsforge has an article about the recent 2.0 release of NetBSD. The article mentions DragonFly, though only in passing while talking about NetBSD’s “big lock” symmetric multiprocessing style. (found with Google Alerts.)

Joerg Sonnerberger’s updating a number of parts of the base system – read his post for details. It means Perl will be out of the base system, finally.

Oliver Fromme linked to a description of Sun’s ZFS with the interesting note that data safety is maintained through copy-on-write. (more links in post) Anil Madhavapeddy pointed at CIL for parsing C, and at some tales of wierd C.

Paul Grenwald posted his Laptop Installation Guide to the Sitetronics Wiki.

Zera Holliday posted another DragonFly logo image.

Hiroki Sato has some precompiled X.org 6.8.1 packages for testing.

The prebuilt packages at GoBSD.com have been updated; see David Rhodus’s post for details on upgrading. He also notes that you can now buy a 4-CDROM set of DragonFly BSD (branded FireFly BSD) now, with all these packages included.

Zera William Holladay posted a link to an entertaining DragonFly image he created.

The FreeBSD Foundation has received enough donations from private individuals to retain non-profit status for 2004.