NetBSD, recently incorporated as a non-profit, produced a 2003 report, where they detail some interesting work formalizing the support structure of a mostly volunteer project. I don’t recall if I mentioned it before, but the October-December 2003 FreeBSD Status Report came out a while back.
Matt Dillon will be coding a little more slowly for the next while – he broke his right clavicle while riding his bike, so his typing speed has been reduced, temporarily.
BSDCan is happening in Ottawa, Canada, May 13-16. Nothing DragonFly-specific planned there yet…
Matt Dillon mentioned that June is the current target for a 1.0 release of DragonFly BSD.
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has posted his initial thoughts about a packaging system; discussion about is on the dragonfly.kernel mailing list/newsgroup. Simon wants to move fast – 1-2 weeks for suggestions, then some weeks for implementation planning, and then jump in!
Dragonflybsd.org has a new layout, which can be mostly be called my fault.
Joerg Sonnenberger has done some major cleanup to dfports. A cvsup would be a good idea.
A quote from him follows:
“Hi all, next time you update your dfports tree, you must update
/usr/share/mk/bsd.port.mkand/usr/share/mk/bsd.dfport.mktoo. This should fix a lot of the problems various people mentioned in the past weeks. You should also check the dependencies e.g. of GTK+, if you haven’t rebuild your ports after January 25th. Otherwise the dependencies recorded are supposedly broken.”
Andreas Hauser noted that he creates a tarball of the DragonFly source fresh on a daily basis, and puts it here: http://ftp.fortunaty.net/DragonFlyBSD/dcvs.tar.bz2
Simon ‘corecode’ Schubert has added a BitTorrent file for downloading the latest ISO of DragonFly from his site.
Peter Kadau answered a question from Jonathon McKitrick about getting rid of your boot manager, if you just have DragonFly:
boot0cfg -o noupdate -s 1 -t 0 -B ad0
Matt Dillon followed up on the topic mentioning that the ‘Dangerously Dedicated’ mode from the old FreeBSD installer is probably no longer worthwhile, and may even cause problems.
Matt Dillon posted that if the recent ATAng integration keeps your IDE controller from working (though the opposite is more common), do:
#define NO_ATANG in /usr/src/sys/dev/disk/ata/ata-all.h
Tomaz Borstnar noted that propolice support is still there for GCC2 (the only compiler at the time it was added) but not yet for GCC3. Matt Dillon followed up saying that other ‘gcc3isms’ have to be cleaned up first, though integration shouldn’t be hard.
Spam filters have been turned on for the various DragonFly lists: (Taken from Matt Dillon’s post explaining this)
- Matches against certain really annoying viruses
- With a MIME Content-Type header of text/html
- With a MIME Content-Type header of multipart/alternative
- Without a working reverse DNS lookup
- Without a FQDN formatted HELO line
- With an invalid envelope sender. The spam filter does a realtime
connect back to the SMTP server associated with the envelope sender
and attempts to RCPT to it. If this fails the mail will be rejected.
Matt Dillon’s updated the DragonFly site diary.
Xin Li pointed out a race condition in FreeBSD that exists in DragonFly too. Matt Dillon, on further inspection, found a deeper problem. I’m pasting his description here because he’s speaking another language – I don’t even recognize the acronyms he’s using.
Alan Cox responded with a link to the CMU Mach algorithm on this page as an example of a correct implementation.
Continue reading “Greek to me”
Several more people have reported successful GENERIC kernel builds – and boots – using gcc3. I wonder how/if this changes performance?
Robert Garrett posted that using gcc3 (set your environment var CCVER to gcc3) to buildworld will now succeed.
There’s been a slight conversation about threading, where Jeroen Ruigrok van der Werven mentioned he would want hybrid, or M:N threading. Miguel Mendez chimed in that 1:1 threading, while not as spiffy, is easier to implement and Sten Spans posted a link to this PDF describing 1:1 threading in Linux. (I assume – haven’t read it yet) Matt Dillon brought up a larger issue: asynchronous syscall messaging support is needed before any of this thread work can be done.
Bill Huey (hui) pointed out that the “RCU” Matt Dillon has been talking about in his recent epiphany is “Read-Copy-Update”, mentioned on this page.
Joerg Sonnenberger warned that his NEWCARD patch will go in Tuesday. Further driver work is needed, but nothing should break outright.