DragonFly BSD Digest – Page 445 – A running description of activity related to DragonFly BSD.

2003/12/12

RCNG revs up

Matt Dillon’s updated RCNG in a big way. You can now check the status of, or start, stop, etc. different system services using appropriate single commands like rcstart, rcstop, rcrestart, and so on. varsym -sa will list service status.

The old way had you looking for the appropriate file in /etc/rc.d and issing commands for it, and having to poke throught ps -ax or /var/run/ to see what’s going.

To get this running, do make upgrade_etc in /usr/src/etc, or a regular build/installworld. Also, install /usr/src/sbin/rcrun, and reboot.

2003/12/11

New Team page

There’s a new Team page on the DragonFly website. I’m the one that put it together.

2003/12/11

Autoconf sees DragonFly

Jeroen Ruigrok has previously sent in patches to autoconf that allow it to recognize DragonFly as a system, and this should now be in autoconf CVS.

2003/12/10

Sendfile set superior

Jeffrey Hsu has added a rather complex patch for sendfile(2); I’m going to link to the changelog rather than sum up.

2003/12/10

ProPolice placed

Ryan Dooley’s patch giving stack-smashing protection in libc is in. It’s not on by default. It adds some overhead but little binary size when turned on.

2003/12/10

2 handy scripts

Matt Dillon posted 2 scripts he finds handy for searching in the source tree. The first one is used on its own, with the argument being the search target:

#!/bin/csh # # /usr/local/bin/search find . -type f -and -not -name '*.*o' -and -not -name '*.a' -and -not -name '*.kld' | fgrep -v ./compile | xargs egrep "$argv" | egrep -v 'Binary'

And the other script, used to pull files containing the searchterm into an editor like so: ‘vi `pullout searchterms`’

#!/bin/csh # # /usr/local/bin/pullout /usr/local/bin/search $argv | awk -F : '{ print $1; }' | sort | uniq

2003/12/10

Oh say can you C

Dave Leimbach pointed at Cyclone during a discussion of dealing with insecure functions like sprintf() and strcopy()

2003/12/09

AGP additions

Craig Dooley submitted a patch to add a number of improvements to agp, from FreeBSD5.

2003/12/08

ProPolice possible pick

Ryan Dooley proposed adding ProPolice to the base system, and already has a potential patch.

2003/12/08

IPC finalized and soon complete

Matt Dillon will be finishing up IPC using the model mocked up in libcaps. This will enable functions like getpwuid() as an IPC serviceand out of libc. If I recall correctly, IPC = Inter-Process Communication, as acronyms are a common question lately.

2003/12/08

Auto alternative

Jos Backus pointed at buildtool as an alternative to the various auto* tools.

2003/12/08

lnc and vx in

Code to add the lnc and vx network drivers from FreeBSD-5 is in, put together by Joerg Sonnenberger. This is part of the PCI compat cleanup, though these just-added drivers just use newbus.

2003/12/07

Libcaps update

Libcaps, the library for userland threading, has been updated. Work is still proceeding on fp stave/restore, and some other tasks, including Galen Sampson’s work. Matt Dillon’s commit message sums it up as neatly as possible, so I’ll just paste it:

Major update to libcaps. Implement support for virtual cpus using
rfork_thread() and implement IPIs, per-virtual-cpu globaldata areas,
and per-virtual-cpu LWKT scheduling.

2003/12/06

Dragonfly takes off

Boeing’s X-50A rotor craft is apparently named the “Dragonfly“. No real relation to this project, but it’s fun to see other places the name is used.

2003/12/04

rsync remote exploit

David Rhodus noted that rsync is now at version 2.5.7 because of a remotely-exploitable heap overflow. Anyone running a rsync mirror, especially of DragonFly, should update. This is in part the exploit that damaged a Gentoo mirror and a GNU server.

2003/12/04

libcaps halfway

Galen Sampson and Matt Dillon have committed the first stage of the userland threading – globaldata structure and thread primitives are connected, and libcaps can lock in a fashion similar to the existing kernel locks.

2003/12/04

Temporary port fix

Peter Kadau noted that if you are building a program such as XFree86 and it complains about not being able to find a particular library that you know exists on your system, you can use cpdup to move it (between, for instance, /usr/local/lib and /usr/X11R6/lib).

This is a temporary fix. However, if you are experiencing this right now, it’s probably because of an out-of-date dfports. Delete all packages, update, and reinstall packages, and you should be OK.

2003/12/03

Quiet for a reason

I haven’t had any posts for the past day or so because there’s not been a lot of activity on the mailing lists, and I’m working up an ‘end-of-year’ report similar to the FreeBSD Status Reports. No link yet, cause it’s not done.

2003/12/01

Dillon diary done up

Matt Dillon’s updated his diary.

2003/12/01

nrelease directory

/usr/src/nrelease has the ability to build the new ‘live’ CD iso images. Listed here is what Matt Dillon listed as possible make targets in that directory:

“release: This will do a full buildworld and buildkernel (GENERIC)
with the current source tree, then generate the release
ISO and directory structure in /usr/release.

quickrel: This will do a ‘quick’ buildworld and buildkernel (i.e.
-DNOCLEAN) and then generate the release ISO and directory
structure in /usr/release.

realquickrel: This is even faster. It assumes that the buildkernel and
buildworld have already been done and just generates the ISO
directory structure and ISO file in /usr/release.”