Matthew Dillon has a summary of the development work he’s done over the past week or so. The condensed version: things faster, bugs fixed. Generally what you want to hear.
Joerg Sonnenberger’s planning to remove more old pkgsrc packages. This includes some packages like php4, which is common and also should die. There’s discussion that can be followed from the post for some details.
The economy, at least in the U.S., seems to be improving. With that in mind, I’ve seen some traffic on the freebsd-jobs mailing list lately. BSD-specific jobs are harder to come by, so take a look if you’re ‘in the market’.
Still not used to typing “2010”.
- I have no idea if bup is a worthwhile backup tool or even if it would compile on DragonFly, but more products should be described this way. (via)
- I’ve seen plenty of articles along the lines of “Open Source and X”, where the article explains at great length how open source in certain situations can work well. “Doing It Wrong” comes at it from a different direction.
- BSD Magaine is going free, meaning it’s a free download starting with the February issue. The site says “sign up for our newsletter and get every issue straight to your inbox” – the correct link is “Newsletter” on the upper right corner of the page. PDFs of the print issues are available too.
- The Open Source Business Resource is now publishing weekly articles in addition to their monthly issue. The inaugural article is “Avatar, Open Source and Humanity 2.0” by Stephen Huddart, and the second is “Do, Delegate, Defer” by the wonderfully-named Emma Jane Hogbin.
- Why you should use OpenGL and not DirectX: linked many places. It’s a good argument, which reminds me… anyone want to work on DRM for DragonFly? It could use some loving.
- A Python script that takes your picture and uploads it every time a merge (in Mercurial) fails. Someone make this work for Git, please. (via)
- Speaking of Git, here’s a way to get auto-complete of git commands and local/remote branches in bash.
- The latest @Play covers the new, developing roguelike Dungeon Crawl, part 1 of many. It’s listed as running on “all the BSDs”, though I don’t see it in pkgsrc. It is playable via telnet to other servers, though.
Matthew Dillon declared his intention to have REDO working for Hammer very soon. This will improve speed by lowering the number of fsync()s needed in a given period of time to flush data to disk.
He continues in a separate message talking at length about data flushing and how to implement it efficiently, with some comparisons to work in FreeBSD. The followups are worth reading, too.
Antonio Huete Jimenez wants to find anyone working on tmpfs for DragonFly; his post about it summarizes the work so far. He’s interested in working on it, in any case.
Why, BSDTalk 184 is our very own Matthew Dillon talking about all the recent changes in DragonFly, for a good half-hour! I’ve listened to about half of it so far… I hadn’t realized the significance of some of the changes in the last two releases. It’s also strange to hear someone mentioning the work you’ve done (pkgsrc bulk builds)…
Jan Lentfer’s posted the steps to test OpenSSL encryption – I link to them because it’s interesting to see the steps spelled out.
Jan’s also posted a patch to enable DNSSEC support throughout BIND and related tools. Test if this interests you. (and it should.)
I’ve always said you can’t be too rich, too thin, or have too much RAM. (I’m paraphrasing a quote from the Dutchess of Windsor.) However, maybe you can have too much RAM. Recent changes by Matthew Dillon have made it possible to run the kernel_map out of RAM depending on the quantity of video RAM and system RAM in use.
This isn’t a significant danger; I’m highlighting it because it’s an odd problem. It’s easy to work around for now. There’s a new utility, kmapinfo, to show mow much kernel memory is being used.
In response to a question about fine-grained vs. coarse locking, Matthew Dillon detailed the locking types used by DragonFly and the remaining work left to make the system able to function completely without the Giant Lock. (hint: VM, something Matt’s known for.)
There were some errors with the dragonflybsd.org domain, which are now fixed. This includes some issues in NNTP access to the discussion groups, which is why I don’t have a link for this.
As previously noted, some of Matthew Dillon’s work was potentially destabilizing. The “danger period” (I saw no issues reported) is over.
It’s New Year’s Eve Eve, and so here are a bunch of links I’ve built up over the past few days.
- Hubert Feyrer posted notes on how to mount fixed disks in KDE. This probably works on NetBSD, but I bet it would work on DragonFly too…
- pcc is now able to build an OpenBSD i386 kernel. Will it work for other BSDs? I hope so, eventually.
- The FreeBSD Foundation is in the last hours of donation for 2009 – give if you get a chance. Did you know they get Bad Code Offsets, like carbon offsets? I did not know such a thing exists, though it makes sense.
- Brian Kernighan talking about Elements of Programming Style, in video. (via) Kernighan’s book, “The Practice of Programming“, with Rob Pike, is an excellent read.
BSDTalk was recently linked here interviewing Randal Schwartz. Randal Schwartz and Leo Laporte, who create a podcast called “FLOSS 101 Weekly”, now have an interview with Scott Ullrich and Chris Buechler about pfSense. (via) It’s a nice bit of symmetry, and Scott was an early contributor to DragonFly – specifically, the installer.
Everything that _why the lucky stiff did. (via) _why is one of those things that only the Internet lets exist. And he used DragonFly!
Roguelike games, evaluated via the Berlin Interpretation, on @Play. Also, a dedicated Roguelike handheld?
Naoya Sugioka is working on bringing tmpfs to DragonFly – I am a big fan of that idea.
top now uses CTIME, not WCPU.
BSDTalk (4 years old!) has 24 minutes of talk with Randal Schwartz, talking about a whole pile of different subjects. I met Randal before – he’s a decent guy.
A recruiter found me through my administrative role for DragonFly in Google’s Summer of Code, and passed along a job description. I’ll paste it after the cut. If you’re looking for a job (or know someone who might match this job), contact me and I’ll pass contact information around.
Edit: The recruiter has a similar but non-BSD job also available…)
Man, I hope this works out. In the job climate we’ve had the past year or so, helping someone get a job is very fulfilling. Plus, the job sounds cool…
I didn’t set anything up with the Digest and tumblr… Please speak up, if you did it. (found via Google)
Avalon.dragonflybsd.org was power cycled, so pkg_radd works now, as does git.dragonflybsd.org.
I love love graphs, and Alex Hornung has created a graph showing the lock contention on a DragonFly system during a buildkernel. (ganked from EFNet #dragonflybsd on IRC)