The next release of X is almost out; it’s not released yet contrary to some reports. When it is out, or if you are running a release candidate, there’s a note here about how to enable some of the new features. Hopefully a port will be available.
By the way, there is a test version of pf for DragonFly, available to try.
‘walt’ posted in kernel@ a note about the new Linux staircase scheduler, available here, and how it may be useful for DragonFly.
Matthew Dillon noted in this post to kernel@ that he anticipates 64-bit work in perhaps 6 months, after VFS is completed.
‘Rum’ has started work on dfport overrides for KDE 3.3.0. (The link he supplies appears not to work yet, however.)
Matthew Dillon pointed out that when comitting functional changes to the DragonFly source, keep them separate from other modifications. That way, when other BSDs/projects use these modifications, it will be much easier for them to review and use.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert is looking for more information on finite state automatons, since a number of them appear in the DragonFly source.
… but it’s still being worked on.
Porting SMBUS support from FreeBSD would be a good small project for anyone to try, though Jeroen Ruigrok/asmodai may beat you to it.
forknibbler.com now lists the DragonFly docs that are located there, including a PDF version of the Handbook.
The ports/x11/nvidia-driver port currently stops during build with an error about vnode_if.h. This is being worked on.
As Matthew Dillon described in a post to bugs@, anyone with a little assembly knowledge could fix up 8254 access.
Matthew Dillon’s 4th VFS patch probably will go in today. ‘esmith’ asked why nullfs was so broken on FreeBSD, and how it was better on DragonFly, to which Matthew Dillon posted this reply, which happens to include some details of his next major task.
Update: commited, with further explanation of what changed.
(seen on DaemonNews) BSD Ports Manipulator appears to be rather spiffy, and may work with the ports system on DragonFly. The “B” instead of “F” implies it should be handling more than just ports, though.
As a few people have found out, turning on some compiler optimizations such as -O2 with gcc 3.4 will cause problems, though Joerg Sonnenberger did just fix one issue. The speed benefits may be more mental than real, anyway
Matthew Dillon has a third VFS patch up; he’s looking for anyone using UFS under heavy load, or other filesystems. This is dangerous, as he expects there to be crashing with this patch.
Looks like Serenity Systems has a Serenity Virtual Station (link from Slashdot) product that lets you run a virtual machine, much like VMWare, and they have a FreeBSD-native version. This may work on DragonFly, though it’ll take someone with a spare $50USD to find out.
If you’re looking for something to do, you can always help with language locales. This does not require programming experience.