‘esmith’ asked about udev/hotplug in contrast to FreeBSD-5’s devfs, listing these links for more info.
http://www.kernel.org/pub/linux/utils/kernel/hotplug/udev-FAQ
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/1893
http://www.gentoo.org/doc/en/udev-guide.xml
Joerg Sonnenberger is merging some FreeBSD 5.x changes to kobj, which changes the ABI. This means rebuild all modules on your next kernel build. That includes your nvidia driver, too, if you have it.
Matt Dillon found that using short-form names in /etc/fstab would cause the DNS resolver to return “host not found”, even if there was just a timeout (which should result in “try again”) when first looking up that name. This is now fixed. If you found you could not mount NFS volumes at boot, but they worked when done manually after boot, this should fix it.
Jeremy Almey alerted me to the DragonFly Wikipedia entry that he maintains – a good summary of the project, including one of the better explanations of tokens and the LWKT that I’ve seen.
Andre Nathan asked for links on SSI (Single System Image), since that’s DragonFly’s pie-in-the-sky goal. Walt gave a link to Larry McVoy’s paper (Linux-specific) on the subject.
Now there’s NetBSD quarterly reports, too. Seems like reader-friendly BSD reports is a good idea, eh?
Matt Dillon’s posted about the namecache work he plans to be doing now; his summary is included here.
Continue reading “More namecache plans”
Ivan Voras has finished his benchmark of a system running FreeBSD, NetBSD, DragonFly and Linux. DragonFly does quite well, coming unsurprisingly close to the leader – FreeBSD 4.x. The difference would probably be more pronounced on a multiprocessor system, which wasn’t used in these benchmarks.
Stack smashing protection, also known as ProPolice, is now on by default when using gcc3. (It’s already been on by default for gcc2 for some time now.)
For those of us from FreeBSDland, the kernel upgrade process is (well, recently) solidified to a number of steps including mergemaster. Matt Dillon noted that the DragonFly upgrading process is thus:
(update via cvsup)
cd /usr/src
make buildworld
make buildkernel KERNCONF=<kernel config file>
make installkernel KERNCONF=<kernel config file>
make installworld
make upgrade
The “make upgrade” step replaces mergemaster, and should be relatively faster. Credit for this goes to Sascha Wildner for asking for clarification on the dragonfly.bugs mailing list.
Matt Dillon posted this little note on how to get a kernel crash dump, which seems a good idea to archive – this may be useful again:
The best way is to get a kernel crash dump. If your swap area (typically ad0s1b) is large enough to accomodoate main memory, then ‘dumpon /dev/ad0s1b’ (and put ‘dumpdev=/dev/ad0s1b’ in your /etc/rc.conf), and then when it crashed and drops into DDB> type ‘panic’ and hit return twice and it should hopefully generate a crash dump.
For the crash dump to be really useful having the kernel.debug for the kernel that you are running is important. kernel.debug is built automatically when you buildkernel, but only the stripped ‘kernel’ version is actually installed. kernel.debug should still be sitting in the kernel build object directory which is usually
/usr/obj/usr/src/sys/<KERNELNAME>(if you used ‘buildkernel’ to build your kernel).
An earlier conversation about threading here, which generated a bit of discussion, has a comment from a Sun employee who authored one of the cited papers. It seems strange to turn a comment into news, but it’s a nice resolution.
Max Okumoto posted a link to a paper describing the Container Shipping I/O System, which may be similar to the XIO system proposed by Matt.
Matt Dillon had what he described as a “brainfart for threaded VFS and data passing between threads” based on Alan Cox’s FreeBSD 5 PIPE work that he has been importing, leading to a new concept he calls “XIO”. It’s a long ramble, so I’m reprinting it wholesale:
Continue reading “Dillon Brainfart”
Chris Pressey, the newest committer, has been in a cleanup frenzy – he’s had 140 commits already, many of them cleanup of the existing source code. Go Chris!
The Fred Plush is apparently not as expensive to ship to the western hemisphere as initially expected – mail fred at ibotty.net for details – he can take PayPal now.
There’s pictures of a prototype of the plush DragonFly mascot. It’s missing one set of legs, but it’s otherwise accurate to what is being sold.
Tobias Florek has plush Freds – the dragonfly mascot for DragonFly. He’s in Europe, and it costs 16 Euros plus shipping – mail fred at ibotty.net. First come, first serve. If you live on the western side of the Atlantic, shipping costs make it prohibitive, so no luck for U.S. and Canada residents yet. (A U.S. distributor is being worked on.)