An interesting confluence

Michal Ostrowski, a developer with the K42 project at IBM Research, posted to dragonfly.kernel and noted that DragonFly and K42 are very similar in design and could benefit from interaction. He brought up several papers located on their site: a K42 overview, K42 and traditional UNIX APIs, and K42’s threading and scheduling infrastructure. The closely-related Tornado operating system also has some good information.

I’ve been playing too much Day of Defeat; I see ‘KAR98‘ every time I read K42. The project’s not about a teutonic WW2 rifle, though – the name K42 has a different origin.

SCO hints at widening suit

Jeroen Ruigrok pointed out this Newsforge article that says SCO will probably be bringing the AT&T settlement over BSD into court. According to people’s opinions, however, this is a last legal flailing, rather than anything that will significantly affect BSD-derived systems like DragonFly.

Daemonnews also has a mention of this, where Marc Rassbach points out the article’s author has a ‘poison pen’ history vs. BSD products, and Peter Hansteen notes a Forbes article on SCO, this Byte article, and the ever-bearded Greg Lehey’s excellent appraisal of this mess.

Release styles

According to Matt Dillon, DragonFly will skip the multiple branch style of FreeBSD (STABLE, CURRENT branches) and tag the single main branch, slipping as needed for security fixes.

Light reading

Joshua Coombs asked about good books for BSD kernel/network programming. Jeroen Ruigrok listed: “The Design and Implementation of 4.4BSD”, “Unix Internals: The New Frontiers”, and “The Design of the Unix Operating System”.

DrASCIIFly

From Joshua Coombs:

          _  _
          ()()
 _________|  |_________
(_________\  /_________)
(_________/  \_________)
       __/|  |\__
          |  |
           ||
           ||
           ||
           \/

Matt Dillon’s schedule

This week Matt Dillon is doing:

  • lwkt_token and IPI code optimization
  • GCC 3.x (just for support of the next item)
  • 64 bit AMD64 support
… and networking code with Jeff Hsu.

For those of you late to the party and wondering why his work schedule is spotlighted, Matt Dillon is the originator of the DragonFly project, and is doing much heavy lifting.

CARP vs. VRRP

Jeroen Ruigrok supplied these links about patent issues with Cisco’s VRRP during a thread about importing OpenBSD’s CARP as part of pf.

http://www.in-addr.de/pipermail/lvs-users/2001-November/004135.html
http://kerneltrap.org/node/view/477/1567
http://kerneltrap.org/comment/reply/477/1567
http://marc.theaimsgroup.com/?l=openbsd-misc&m=102883972229241&w=2
https://www1.ietf.org/mail-archive/working-groups/vrrp/current/msg00318.html

Bugzilla brought in

Jeroen Ruigrok is setting up Bugzilla for tracking bugs/requests for DragonFly. As part of the process, there’s some 6,000 (!) items brought over from FreeBSD-4. No link yet…