Sascha Wildner has moved gcc in DragonFly to a slightly newer version: 4.4.5. It mostly seems to make things easier to compile, going by the reports I’ve heard. This is the version that will be in DragonFly 2.10.
It’s Dragonfly, and it sounds very similar to swapcache(8). Coincidence? Maybe. (via bodie on EFNet #dragonfly IRC)
Getting into the swing of this link collection thing…
- The first paragraph of this things magazine post is about the “lingering memory of the space of ancient video games.” It’s good; follow the links to read. It also mentions the excellent This Gaming Life book, which is on the shelf to the right of me as I type, and can be read in full online. (though it’s worth buying.)
- This made me laugh.
- How to kill your online community. Good guidelines for how to (not) act.
- This week’s “Only the Internet could produce this”: Einstein vs. Hawking, the rap battle.
- pcc is now at version 1.0.
- Anyone have recommendations for a good domain registrar? I’m sick of mine.
There’s a number of pkgsrc packages that have a combination of security vulnerabilites and lack of updates for more than a year which is placing them on the chopping block. (Follow the discussion to see which ones make it off the list.) The removals will happen after the next branch, pkgsrc-2011Q1, which is itself due in two days.
If you’re running the bleeding edge version of DragonFly, because Sepherosa Ziehau’s recent work makes it possible to boot systems that were previously bootable, you may need this sysctl trick loader tunable in loader.conf:
debug.acpi.enabled="pci pci_link"
How will you know that you need it? The system will run strangely slow. The command enables ACPI interrupt routing, which corrects for mptable problems.
pf in DragonFly 2.9 is currently equivalent to OpenBSD’s 4.4 version. This is probably what will be in the next release version of DragonFly, as Jan Lentfer, the man responsible for the rapid, recent pf upgrades, is a new father (again). Congratulations on the new daughter, Jan!
I had linked to this before during Summer of Code 2010 before it completed, but an ongoing discussion on the kernel@ mailing list for DragonFly reminded me: a student named Naohiro Aota put together a Gentoo/DragonFly system for SoC 2010, similar to the existing Gentoo/FreeBSD project. He’s interested in working directly with DragonFly, now.
John Marino’s work on getting support for DragonFly ‘natively’ into binutils, upstream, has been successful. Thanks, John!
I’ve found enough good links I’m able to schedule this post ahead of time. Yay!
- Michael Lucas, BSD book author, is selling a short story via Amazon/Kindle. It has nothing to do with BSD, directly.
- Also, he offers beer to anyone who can get KVM working on a BSD. Any BSD. I guess vkernels don’t count, really.
- This idea came up at work recently: Etherkiller!
- The evolution of computer displays. (via) It covers some pretty ancient stuff – the article doesn’t even get to Pong until page 3.
- A paper on the new PBI format for PC-BSD (PDF). This is being presented at AsiaBSDCon.
- The Dancing Poultry License (via ftigeot on EFNet #dragonflybsd)
- A chart of the evolution of science fiction. (via) There’s some good titles in there, if you can read it.
As already mentioned on this Digest, the freeze for the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, pkgsrc-2011Q1, has started. I’ve also completed several bulk builds of pkgsrc-2010Q4 and pkgsrc-current using DragonFly system with GCC 4.4. Francois Tigeot has very kindly gone out of his way to get some of the (relatively few) broken packages listed in those builds to be fixed.
As noted in announcements, pkgsrc is entering a 10-day freeze period starting tomorrow. If everything goes to plan, the next quarterly release of pkgsrc, 2011Q1, will be released April 3rd.
There’s a DragonFly BSD group on identi.ca, the not-as-creepy-as-Facebook social site.
APIC support has been updated, so not only will some machines work better/at all with a multiprocessor kernel, more machines will boot. Not only that, but Sepherosa Ziehau has a newer version of ACPI and interrupt routing available. This is wonderful news! We’ve needed this update for some time.
My first bulk build of pkgsrc with gcc 4.4 has completed; the results are available. Notice that most of the errors are from checksum problems with downloads, not actual problems from the compiler change. I’m starting a new build to see if the checksum problems go away with fresh downloads.
For the curious, or for those who plan ahead, I posted what’s on the Google Summer of Code student application for DragonFly.
If you were thinking of working on a disk scheduler for DragonFly, this is your lucky day! Brills Peng asked for some overall guidance on how to start on a Summer of Code project. I threw out some general tips, Alex Hornung talked up resources on kernel programming, and Venkatesh Srinivas described exactly what you’d need to write a disk scheduler. There’s about 50% of a whole proposal, prewritten.
We made it into Google Summer of Code for a 4th year! (yay!)
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/org/show/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
If you want to mentor, apply here:
http://www.google-melange.com/gsoc/mentor/request/google/gsoc2011/dragonflybsd
(You will need to create a login if you don’t have one.) I’m assuming the applicants are going to be people I know with a direct history with DragonFly; otherwise be prepared to give a good history. Signing up to mentor does not mean you must mentor if there aren’t any projects that interest you; it does mean you need to review applications and provide feedback for students March 28th – April 8th.
If you want to be a student with DragonFly:
Check the projects page for ideas:
http://www.dragonflybsd.org/docs/developer/gsocprojectspage/
… or come up with your own.
Get your application together by March 28th. Start talking about it on the mailing list or IRC or however as soon as you can; there’s a direct relationship between the amount of preparation we see beforehand and people getting accepted.
Here’s the timeline:
http://www.google-melange.com/document/show/gsoc_program/google/gsoc2011/timeline
Copied from my email to users@/kernel@, cause it has everything you need.
The newest BSDTalk has a roughly 15-minute talk with Dan Langille about the upcoming 2011 BSDCan and PGCon events.
Samuel Greear has been working on a module to translate Hammer snapshots into Windows-style shadow copies, so a Hammer volume’s snapshots would be accessible when shared to a Windows machine, or anything that understood shadow copies, so Samba.
He’s put up his work so far; it’s not finished, but he has schoolwork to get to and wants to make it available for anyone who wants to run with it. (say, for Summer of Code…) Apparently the macros in the shadow_copy2 or onefs modules are similar to what a Hammer module would need…