I wrote up some thoughts for the next release of DragonFly. There’s some project work in there for anyone interested. The next release should be near the end of May.
One of the requirements to get NSS/LDAP working on (most) any unixlike system is to have dynamic binaries; meaning they are dependent on various libraries to run. Since you’re talking about programs for login when you’re talking about NSS/LDAP, that means if the libraries aren’t available, you can’t log in. DragonFly has static binaries just to avoid that problem.
Francois Tigeot proposed switching to dynamic binaries and building a /rescue directory with static backups, as is the case with I think FreeBSD and NetBSD. If you follow the thread, it looks like the best path is to use initrd instead. Initrd stands for INITial Ram Disk, and is the first volume the computer sets up to boot from BIOS. Since initrd gives the computer enough space to load all the needed modules (like Hammer2…), it works without making the computer dependent on various libraries or having a bloated /rescue directory.
(Someone correct me if I have the details wrong.) As long as we’re talking about things that would help DragonFly in a larger environment, can someone work on a VM balloon memory driver, too?
If you noticed the lack of a GUI DVD image for the 3.6 release of DragonFly, I posted a followup note on the users@ list that talks about the steps to get X installed. It’s not much work, with pkg set up.
Normally I’d save this for Lazy Reading, but I’m indirectly involved: the Rochester Institute of Technology now has a minor in Open Source and Free Culture. Here’s the press release. I taught one of the precursor classes, Humanitarian Free/Open Source Development (essentially open source development methods) last spring. Steve Jacobs was my advisor years ago and Remy Decausemaker was my (best) student from the HFOSS class. In any case, the courses are definitely worth it. (via)
bugs.dragonflybsd.org, the bug reporting site for DragonFly, uses Redmine. It’s been updated and now can take OpenID for your login.
pfi, the automated installer that nobody knows about, now supports installing an authorized_keys file as part of an install. Credit goes to Alex Hornung for adding the functionality.
I’ve tagged version 3.6.1 of DragonFly, and built ISO/img files of it. They should be available by now on mirrors if you need them, or you can just upgrade as normal. See the linked tag commit message for what’s changed.
As I mentioned on kernel@, I’m going to roll a point release of DragonFly soon. Push in your changes if you want to get them in!
Antonio Huete put together a list of goals for the next release on the DragonFly bugtracker. Some of them are pretty ambitious, some of them are relatively easy, but they are all very useful.
Probably because of the C-state changes, Sepherosa Ziehau wants people to use a new set of sysctls instead of the hw.cpu_mwait* ones – at least on x86_64. This won’t affect you if you aren’t already familiar with them, probably.
Recent updates to tzcode apparently fixed a long-standing time zone bug in DragonFly. POSIX says the America/New_York timezone is picked as default if nothing else has been selected. That didn’t happen in DragonFly – until recently. If your timezone seemed to suddenly jump to U.S. Eastern time, that’s because you never picked before.
Antonio Huete set up a DragonFly status page on status.io.
Address Space Layout Randomization, since 2010. Carsten Mattner asked, and Alex Hornung answered. (Set the sysctl vm.randomize_mmap to 1 to enable it.)
If you want to test out the latest (20131218) update to ACPICA, Sepherosa Ziehau’s got a patch for you. This will be good for anyone who wants to use less electricity. (updated to reflect this doesn’t enable deeper C-states as I thought it did.)
Matthew Dillon acquired one of the Acer c720 Chromebooks recently. There were changes needed for the boot process, for the keyboard, an update from FreeBSD for the ath(4) wireless (g), smbus, and trackpad… but it works now, and he detailed exactly how to get it running, and even upgrade the drive.
John Marino has moved DragonFly from binutils 2.22 to 2.24. I think this may require a full buildworld when upgrading… not sure. Anyway, binutils has a changelog if you are curious.
This post from Konrad Neuwirth asking how to do a minimal installation of DragonFly led to this list of all the ‘knobs’ you can set to make your installation smaller, from John Marino. (And your buildworld faster, if that’s appealing to you.) I also pointed at rconfig and PFI, which are criminally underdocumented.
pkg 1.2 is coming out. This brings a number of new features, but as John Marino posted, you may want to delete your old pkg.conf to keep the new version from complaining about an old config file. This upgrade is a step on the way to signed packages, which is a Good Idea.
Remember the ‘mini roadmap’, mentioned last week yesterday? John Marino put together a Google Docs spreadsheet to track the task status; several items are already cleared off. Take a look and tackle a task.
John Marino posted a possible ‘roadmap’ for DragonFly, now that we’re past the 3.6 release. The thread went on for some ways as it was discussed, including my crazy ideas. Notably, several suggested items have already been tackled – an iwn(4) upgrade has already happened, and an update to bmake, based on John’s vendor branch update instructions.