It looks like 2.8 will be showing up in a few weeks – mid-October. If things go well, we’ll have prebuilt pkgsrc-2010Q3 binaries to go with it.
Venkatesh Srinivas (whee!) has written up a lengthy post about his idlezero work. It provides a nice peek into recent work, and how parts of DragonFly work. I’d normally save it for a Lazy Reading entry, but I don’t want to wait that long. It should hopefully show up on the dragonflybsd.org site too.
Starting September 23rd, pkgsrc will freeze (i.e. bugfixes only) in preparation for the 2010Q3 release, which is planned for one week later, instead of the usual 2 weeks. This release will include some very new software like Postgres 9, too.
Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.
Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip. It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list. It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.
‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager. The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.
I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted. Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process. (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)
Swapoff has been added to DragonFly. This was a potential Summer of Code project, and also happened to have a bounty offered for it. $300 goes to Ilya Dryomov. If money for code like this interests you, check the Code Bounties page for more projects…
Dear universe: improved interrupt routing, or deduplication in HAMMER would make me happy. I’m not picky.
I totally meant to post this yesterday. Oops!
- We’re using toeplitz. I just like the name; I don’t understand how it works.
- The idea of software forks has been around since, oh, BSD and System V Unix diverged, if not earlier. Here’s an article that talks about forking in general, rather breathlessly. After reading that, read this perhaps more accurate fork parody. (via)
- You know what we could use for pkgsrc, and all the other port/package collections? Explanation. They face the same problem phone application stores face: too many programs to easily select what you need. You could certainly build a whole site just around package reviews; it’s even possible to argue that Ubuntu or PC-BSD are built around just making some 3rd-party-app choices ahead of time on an existing operating system. Anyway, here’s an article talking about that idea specifically around the Apple App Store. Please won’t somebody who is not me do something like that for pkgsrc?
- This writeup of one man’s experience with Forth gives a good feel for the language, or at least as good a feel as I can understand. Posted in memoriam for our recently departed Forth bootloader. (via) There’s other enjoyable articles on that blog, too.
- This describes about two years of my life, except it was mostly Zangband.
Another B-Side show, this time with additional recordings from the pfSense show.
David BÉRARD has an patch for TCP-MD5 support; if this interests you, please test.
As I found out directly, upgrading from pkgsrc version 2010Q1 to 2010Q2 has a minor quirk: binary packages for 2010Q2 will refuse to install with an older version of pkg_install. Rebuild pkgtools/pkg_install to the 2010Q2 version and the problem will go away.
There’s a podcast titled “The BSD Show!”, which I didn’t know. What’s more, it has 15 minutes of Warner Losh speaking about FreeNAS. That’s the 4th broadcast so far. (via)
(added it to the links, too)
Jim Brown asked about using the DragonFly logo, and as part of his request described (slightly) the BSD Professional certification exam, and how they are testing.
Two things:
- If you are running DragonFly 2.7, Matthew Dillon has made some kernel changes, so updating your 2.7 machine will require a full buildworld cycle, not quickworld.
- The binary packages for 2.6 and 2.7 have been updated to pkgsrc-2010Q2. This means that pkg_radd will automatically pull down newer packages, and you should make sure your /usr/pkgsrc is using the pkgsrc-2010Q2 release if you want to be sure there’s no version mismatches.
I recently sent out a description of what built for pkgsrc-2010Q2 , though the section on not changing the stable link is no longer true.
Anyone want to implement TCP-MD5? (RFC2385, among others.) David BÉRARD would find it useful.
Nikolai Lifanov has created a DragonFly hosting service. It’s vkernel-based, with a variety of options in disk and RAM. It’s at http://dflyhost.net/. (added to the links here, too)
BSDTalk has a 19 minute interview with Mike Larkin talking about ACPI and OpenBSD.
Matthew Dillon has provided some details about recent kernel work, along with a release forecast.
You have probably seen reports declaring the demise of OpenSolaris by now, many taking a less than conservative approach in reporting the news one way or the other. So what do you make of the news? By all accounts, the source code (including future changes) for things such as ZFS will continue to be published under the CDDL. Will Oracle closing up development make it impossible for operating systems like FreeBSD to maintain ZFS without forking it? What do you think the ramifications will be for DragonFly’s HAMMER and DragonFly in general?
DSCHED_FQ was added to GENERIC, making it the default disk scheduling policy for master. You might want to refresh your memory of dsched and the fairq policy with some prior details and benchmarks.
Update: As Venkatesh Srinivas pointed out in the comments, adding DSCHED_FQ to GENERIC does not make it the default, but you no longer have to load the fairq module. Which raises the question, should fairq be the default?