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.
If you happen to live in Holland with some spare NVIDIA cards, SMP motherboards, or hard drives, or you live anywhere in the US with a spare laptop that could run DragonFly, then you should be looking at the Donations page.
Sascha Wildner is looking for people to try his 16/32 bit patch for syscons, the DragonFly console mechanism.
dragonflybsd.org now has a donations page.
David Rhodus posted that the packages at GoBSD.com have been updated. This is the remote package location that is used by default by the ‘pkg_add‘ tool.
For instance, pkg_add -r gnome2‘ or ‘pkg_add -r kde3‘ will pull down the new versions of each. (pkg_delete existing packages first.) You can see the latest packages or the whole list.
I’ve set up a Bugzilla bug tracker at forknibbler.com, to use until a full-blown system is available at dragonflybsd.org. Be kind – it’s a woefully underpowered machine.
Leaf.dragonflybsd.org has been significantly upgraded; this is where shell accounts and the mail archive are located.
“Micha³ ‘GiM’ Spadliñski” posted a link to a 80×15 DragonFly banner.
If you’re feeling religious: a petition for Flash on BSD.
The FreeBSD NVIDIA driver has been updated; Emiel Kollof has a test DragonFly version of this new update he’d like people to try out.
A discussion about the planned and ongoing VFS changes has led to some very informative posts (that’s 3 different links) from Matthew Dillon about what he plans to do.
The Center for Internet Security has released a “FreeBSD Benchmark and Scoring Tool“. This may also work on DragonFly.