Goings-on – Page 72 – DragonFly BSD Digest

2009/04/202009/04/20

Summer of Code accepted students

There’s 5 slots for DragonFly in Summer of Code for 2009, and the students in those slots are listed below. We had some very good applications; more than we had room for and higher quality than last year. If you did not get in, please consider working independently.

Student: Alexander Hornung
Project: DevFS for DragonFly BSD
Mentor: joe talbott

Student: Dan Chis
Project: Support debugging of multi-threaded applications
Mentor: schubert simon

Student: robert luciani
Project: Profile kernel contention on MP systems
Mentor: Samuel Greear

Student: Jordan Gordeev
Project: Finish amd64 port of DragonFly
Mentor: Matthew Dillon

Student: efstathios kamperis
Project: C99/POSIX Conformance Audit
Mentor: hasso tepper

(announcement here)

2009/04/192009/04/19

Eating your own dogfood

Bad: having the system used for mirroring DragonFly crash a lot.

Good: Replacing that Linux system with DragonFly.

2009/04/17

Encryption ideas for backups

Sdävtaker came up with a potential idea for encrypting backup files, and Matthew Dillon followed up with another way that uses Hammer.

2009/04/152009/04/14

New pkgsrc tool: pkg_dry

There’s a new tool being put together for pkgsrc installation and management, called pkg_dry. There’s an initial version for download with instructions from its creator, Emile “iMil” Heitor. It looks to duplicate the functionality of apt-get or yum, by handling binary-only remote package management.

Someone please test this on DragonFly, though not on a production machine… If it does end up matching apt-get (the only thing I like in Debian) in terms of functionality, that will be fantastic! I have wanted something like this for a while.

2009/04/14

Now working on VirtualBox

Antonio Huete Jimenez reports that DragonFly now can install and run without issue on VirtualBox 2.2.0; it had been unable to work in previous releases.

2009/04/13

How badly did that break things?

Hasso Tepper reported on the results of Peter Avalos’s major libc changes; someone retiring libc_r would help, as would someone figuring out why unistd.h isn’t found on DragonFly.

2009/04/12

qemu and kqemu work

Naoya Sugioka has some preliminary patches for kqemu on DragonFly. In testing, he found it made qemu run slower, which is the opposite of its purpose, so he’d appreciate suggestions.

2009/04/11

Viewer for git

Can someone who uses git more heavily than I do look at Tig, a git viewer, and mention if it is useful? It looks interesting, as one of the features that git ‘lacks’ is a visual client other than at the command line.

2009/04/02

OSBR, roguelikes

I’m going to mesh together two unrelated items in this post:

The April OSBR is out, with this issue being a focus on Open APIs.

The newest @Play column covers winners of the 7DRL, or “7 Day Roguelike” contest, where contestants build a new roguelike game in a week. There are some real oddities, like Decimation. I’m not sure how many of these will build on DragonFly, darnit.

2009/03/31

Help the Macys

This story popped up last year, focusing on Kip Macy’s legal issues. Kip is a BSD developer, contributing to FreeBSD and having worked on checkpoint support in DragonFly. Another side of his story has come to light. He and his wife could use the support, but there is (that I know of) no immediate way to help.

It would be nice if there was some common news source for BSD topics, instead of being an also-ran for Linux; this is an example of where an online community can support its own members, instead of that negative story that has been out for months.

2009/03/26

New committer: Stathis Kamperis

Please welcome our newest DragonFly developer with commit access: Stathis Kamperis

2009/03/252009/03/25

A lot of libc changes to look at

Peter Avalos has a large number of changes to libc in his tree. He’d like to have other eyeballs looking at them, so please read over and comment.

2009/03/242009/03/24

Messylaneous, 03/23/2009

Dru Lavigne has an excellent presentation: “Now What?” for the Open Source Noob
I’ve heard about this before, but: Eric Scott Raymond thinks the GPL can be replaced by the BSD license, safely. The counter-argument on that page is totally weaksauce. (via)
The Q2 2009 issue of BSD Magazine is out, focusing on PC-BSD. (via)
Hey, a “sequel” to wmii: i3 – someone tell me if this works on DragonFly, please. It’s in pkgsrc-wip… (via)

2009/03/212009/03/21

Presentations fixed and added

Thanks to Archimedes Gaviola, I’ve changed out the slide presentations (that didn’t work) on the Presentations page.

I’ve also linked all 5 BSDTalk interviews of Matthew Dillon on that page – previously, only one was linked there.

2009/03/182009/03/18

Progress with clang

Alex Hornung has done some preliminary work with llvm/clang, and has successfully compiled a GENERIC DragonFly kernel, and completed a buildworld, using it. He also has some very nice notes available detailing the work. There’s potential for cross-BSD work with FreeBSD on this one, too.

2009/03/162009/03/15

Unofficial Unix Administration Horror Story Summary

The Unofficial Unix Administration Horror Story Summary, compiled by someone from my alma mater. Read through the section on misuse of ‘rm’ and you will want to use Hammer all the more… (via I forget, sorry)

2009/03/152009/03/15

Place for pkgsrccon in 2009?

Do you have room for more than 25 people? Are you in Europe? If you answered ‘yes’ to both questions, then you could help out with finding a venue for Pkgsrccon 2009.

2009/03/15

Details on vkernel

While these details have probably been explained before, Matthew Dillon has a nice summary of how the vkernel system works, for your weekend reading.

2009/03/14

Think before you buy

It might be time to stop buying Apple audio products, as the company is deliberately picking physical incompatibility to force upgrades.

2009/03/13

Another project: signals

Someone want to fix up siginfo?