Even more RCNG goodness

Matt Dillon has enhanced the varsym/RCNG system to support the following “states” for various services:







runningThe service is running
failedA start or stop operation failed
disabledThe service is disabled
irrelevantThe server is not needed
configuredThe non-process service has been configured
stoppedThe service has been stopped

He also posted the following:

“Call for volunteers! There are many rc.d/ scripts which do not support ‘stop’. Things like sshd and rwho, for example. It would be great if interested parties could start adding ‘stop’ functionality to the more common services. Submit patch sets to submit@dragonflybsd.org”

USEBSD SIG Session

From Murray Stokely by way of Matt Dillon; a request for papers about BSD system use to present this summer in Boston:

UseBSD will be a one-day special interest group session hosted as part of the 2004 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in Boston (June 27 – July 2, 2004). The focus of UseBSD, as the name implies, will be on showcasing ways in which creative members of the BSD community are making use of BSD-on the desktop, in embedded applications, in corporate data centers, in computational clusters, in business environments, and more!”

2 handy scripts

Matt Dillon posted 2 scripts he finds handy for searching in the source tree. The first one is used on its own, with the argument being the search target:

#!/bin/csh
#
# /usr/local/bin/search
find . -type f -and -not -name '*.*o' -and -not -name '*.a' -and -not -name '*.kld' | fgrep -v ./compile | xargs egrep "$argv" | egrep -v 'Binary'

And the other script, used to pull files containing the searchterm into an editor like so: ‘vi `pullout searchterms`’

#!/bin/csh
#
# /usr/local/bin/pullout
/usr/local/bin/search $argv | awk -F : '{ print $1; }' | sort | uniq

IPC finalized and soon complete

Matt Dillon will be finishing up IPC using the model mocked up in libcaps. This will enable functions like getpwuid() as an IPC serviceand out of libc. If I recall correctly, IPC = Inter-Process Communication, as acronyms are a common question lately.

Temporary port fix

Peter Kadau noted that if you are building a program such as XFree86 and it complains about not being able to find a particular library that you know exists on your system, you can use cpdup to move it (between, for instance, /usr/local/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib).

This is a temporary fix. However, if you are experiencing this right now, it’s probably because of an out-of-date dfports. Delete all packages, update, and reinstall packages, and you should be OK.

‘live CD’ available

Matt Dillon has created ‘live CD’ features, so you can boot from a DragonFly CD and get to a useable prompt. To support this, cpdup is now included in /bin, and mount_mfs now has the -C option, which will automatically copy a read-only filesystem into a MFS mount. An experimental ISO is available on the download page.

Be warned that you will have to lay out filesystems on your own with fdisk, disklabel, etc., and this is largely undocumented, except in the README.
Continue reading “‘live CD’ available”

Timing

So, it looks like this:

From an offhand comment Matt Dillon made, the first ‘release’ of Dragonfly is planned at least several months from now. (No definite date yet.) FreeBSD-5 should be entering a stable branch (5.3) around the same time, and the stable 2.6 Linux kernel should be appearing around mid-December, close to the same time as FreeBSD 5.2. KDE 3.2 should also be out in February. Gnome 2.6 is due in March.

So, early 2004 looks like it will have much to play with.

Misc. Code

Normally I wait until the commit happens before I note new code, but the next few days will be hectic. Max Laier submitted patches to add PF, Erik Paulsen Skaalerud is working on ALTQ, and Craig Dooley added support for the Intel mobile ICH4 ATA chipset.

No new groups … yet

Probably in part because of a long-running off-topic SCO thread in dragonfly.kernel, ‘trent’ suggested an advocacy or general group. Matt Dillon said “in a few months, just prior to the first release”.

No contrib changes

In a conversation about updating bind, several people noted that changes other than vendor updates to contrib can wait until there’s a complete packaging system in place. (i.e. things like bind and sendmail are staying in place, for now.)