A new page has popped up on the DragonFly website: How to Port to DragonFly. The work is very thorough, and the author is ‘srussell’, which I think is Stéphane Russell? Thanks, person who I may be misidentifying!
Edit: corrected name spelling
Nice big pile of links this week. Enjoy the reading, especially if you’re still recovering from St. Patrick’s Day festivities. (does that happen outside of the U.S.?)
- I like this “Insufficiently known POSIX shell features” item, because too many of the shell tutorials out there assume you have bash. (via)
- The decline and fall of disk storage prices, summarizing this. Oh, I hope this trend continues. (via)
- Michael Lucas’s disaster and recovery with OpenBSD.
- Sometimes the Internet produces things I can’t ever have thought would exist. Loom-weaved reproductions of Apple 2 game loading screens, complete with crack notice. The image linked is Castle Smurfenstein. (via)
- I had no idea how much DNS prefetching could affect the network. (via)
- Saved Google searches for DragonFly sometimes turn up things I didn’t know about. For example, it appears DragonFly is regularly tested in FFmpeg builds. That’s great! I mentally expect to be left out.
- Open source work == more job opportunities. (via) This is absolutely true, and not just talking about Web 2.0 style companies. I recently hired a junior admin at my workplace. I went through I think 80 resumes and a pile of phone and in-person interviews; if even one of them had listed open-source work, they would have moved to the front of the line – just because it meant they did more.
- PGCon 2011 is coming up, for Postgres users – conveniently right after BSDCan 2011, and in the same location, which is because Dan Langille is working on both.
- Remember how XFCE only supports udev on Linux and nothing else, because it’s too hard to follow the conflicting and changing plans on Linux device support? There’s larger messes. (via this and that) I would suggest that when an organization says “There’s a problem here and that’s the way this works” instead of “There’s a problem; let’s adapt and fix” is a sign of stagnation.
Did you wake up this morning and say, “I wish I knew more about kqueue!” Well, here’s a link (PDF) from Vlad GALU that can help with that.
dragonflybsd.org is down right now, so if you’re looking for the Google Summer of Code ideas page for DragonFly, I have a local mirror of that page.
Update: dragonflybsd.org is back up, but I’ll keep that mirror there just in case…
The GIF format, or rather the LZW format it uses, is no longer patent-encumbered. (GIF patent worries led to the creation of the PNG format, if I’m not mistaken) Matthias Drochner has changed pkgsrc to use giflib instead of libungif.
According to Wikipedia, the patent expired more than 5 years ago, so this isn’t really news other than some packages need to be rebuilt. Still, memories of the general Internet Outrage from a decade ago are interesting compared to the events of today.
Venkatesh Srinivas performed the fefe.de ‘scalability’ benchmarks, which have been mentioned here before. He performed it on different hardware and only with DragonFly, so it’s not really for comparison but rather for analysis. However: graphs!
Matthew Dillon added some system tunables to match these microbenchmarks, and then changed the values. The benchmarks looked better, but according to him you wouldn’t want to run a system normally with those values.
Did you know that Euraeka, a news search site, runs on DragonFly? I did not. Now we both do!
- The Cognitive Style of Unix (via) – I find this argument absolutely correct based on all my computer experience.
- Hacker News is apparently getting more of a general news bent, rather than the actual hacker news it started with. (via) That seems to be an easy trend for many tech sites that start out focused on a topic (Let’s cover this area of interest!) and eventually diffuse (Let’s cover all our reader’s areas of interest!). It may be because that seems to bring greater subscriber numbers? Slashdot would be a good example of this generalization.
- Note to self: Try to not do that with the Digest.
- This page has a lot more good places to visit, but I’ll just link directly cause I don’t have any more commentary to associate with it.
- Did you know there’s open source software for managing conferences? Not conference calls, but full-on have-speakers-with-papers-and-attendees-with-a-schedule conferences? It’s called Pentabarf, and it’s used for BSDCan, among other things. I find the name funny, and it has funny origins.
- Well, if I’m going to have a Discordian link, I should have a BSD-related Subgenius link. By the way: I can perform weddings. You know, just in case that comes up.
- You know you’re important when the IETF needs to come up with a plan to deal with your retirement. (via) This is why it’s neat. Go, look, because this is one of those parts of the Internet that will not exist this way again, ever.
- This article at The Register about how open source isn’t making it very far in app stores is more aggressive than exploratory, as Register articles usually are, but there are some good points: phone app stores are able to charge money because of the ease of the delivery system, which apparently trumps ‘free’. It’s also more purpose-built; pkgsrc I bet would work on an Android phone, but there’s not many applications you could interact with, easily.
Jaime Fournier ran a Ruby benchmark against the various BSDs. (noted via IRC and here) DragonFly came out scoring very well. However! I don’t really know what these benchmarks are testing, since I haven’t used Ruby or these tests before. Jaime seems to be planning more tests.
“Co-Creation” is the theme of this month’s Open Source Business Resource, and appropriately enough, it has two editors. This issue has perhaps the most umlauts ever.
It’s not even released yet, but John Marino and Sascha Wildner have been laying the foundation for using gcc 4.6 in DragonFly. gcc 4.6 looks to have some new things in it; more Objective-C support and Go, too, based on my quick perusal of the gcc website.
“Arjun S R” wrote to the kernel@ mailing list asking about the Google Summer of Code projects for DragonFly that he found interesting. Samuel Greear has a response so detailed it includes links to a similar project proposed last year. It also works as a good model for how much thought needs to go in before you start.
Update: there’s more, plus some pertinent advice!
Matthias Scheler is looking for Postfix testers. If you run it, he has a patch to version 2.8.1 he’d like you to try.
Also, the final list of GTK1-using packages that are not actively updated has been determined. These packages are leaving pkgsrc next week unless there’s any last-minute intercessions.
I’ve linked to it before, but it’s expanded since: the Google Summer of Code projects page on dragonflybsd.org has a whole lot of ideas listed. Please add to it, especially if there’s a project you’d like to be doing. (Here’s more thoughts, for example.)
The pcc compiler is nearing 1.0. (via) This is seen as a gcc alternative, and it’s present in NetBSD/OpenBSD. I recall it didn’t work for DragonFly because of a lack of TLS support… Might be different now, if anyone wants to try. (see prior mentions on the Digest)
Venkatesh Srinivas did a comparison of the default scheduler in DragonFly with the “fairqueue” scheduler, using Interbench, the “interactivity benchmark”. The numbers don’t show a deficit relative to either side, which is OK I guess? I’m not sure how to analyze it.
I posted before about a move to use AT&T’s U-Verse fiber/DSL product for dragonflybsd.org’s connection. It led Matt Dillon to try to add features to compensate for the service’s shortcomings, but it’s still problematic. He’s written up just how broken U-Verse is, calling it “almost a complete failure” as a business connection. The bulk of the problems seem to come from the 2Wire DSL modem supplied by AT&T.
Remember when the Internet used to be the place to find long technical writeups of a product directly from people who were using it? Much of that has disappeared into comment forms and ephemeral Facebook posts. That’s too bad.
If you’re like me, you’ve been using XMMS for music playback since just about forever. It’s ancient, though. It uses GTK1, and since Thomas Klausner is trying to get GTK1 dependencies out of pkgsrc, he listed a roundup of alternatives on the pkgsrc-users mailing list, most/all of which are in pkgsrc. Pouya Tafti added some more.
The dragonflybsd.org sites (well, www anyway) are getting a new network connection, so expect a bit of downtime due to the transition.
The virtio network drivers for DragonFly (mentioned previously here, here, and here) went away. Apparently the original FreeBSD code was not supposed to be available publicly, under a BSD license, and it’s having a knock-on effect for DragonFly and probably NetBSD.
(virtio drivers, if this is an unfamiliar term, are for devices in virtual environments, as when DragonFly is running under VMWare or something similar.)