DragonFly BSD Digest

Matt Dillon has created ‘live CD’ features, so you can boot from a DragonFly CD and get to a useable prompt. To support this, cpdup is now included in /bin, and mount_mfs now has the -C option, which will automatically copy a read-only filesystem into a MFS mount. An experimental ISO is available on the download page.

Be warned that you will have to lay out filesystems on your own with fdisk, disklabel, etc., and this is largely undocumented, except in the README.
Continue reading “‘live CD’ available”

So, it looks like this:

From an offhand comment Matt Dillon made, the first ‘release’ of Dragonfly is planned at least several months from now. (No definite date yet.) FreeBSD-5 should be entering a stable branch (5.3) around the same time, and the stable 2.6 Linux kernel should be appearing around mid-December, close to the same time as FreeBSD 5.2. KDE 3.2 should also be out in February. Gnome 2.6 is due in March.

So, early 2004 looks like it will have much to play with.

Not much to report, in part because of the U.S. holiday, so here’s a link to a recently-announced OpenBSD variant: ekkoBSD.

Matt Dillon has pictures posted from the BSD Party.

Normally I wait until the commit happens before I note new code, but the next few days will be hectic. Max Laier submitted patches to add PF, Erik Paulsen Skaalerud is working on ALTQ, and Craig Dooley added support for the Intel mobile ICH4 ATA chipset.

Probably in part because of a long-running off-topic SCO thread in dragonfly.kernel, ‘trent’ suggested an advocacy or general group. Matt Dillon said “in a few months, just prior to the first release”.

Emiel Kollof plans to change the Heimdal utilities to a format more similar to other platforms, unless someone else wants it.

In a conversation about updating bind, several people noted that changes other than vendor updates to contrib can wait until there’s a complete packaging system in place. (i.e. things like bind and sendmail are staying in place, for now.)

In a followup to the K42 post, Max Laier pointed at the L4Ka project, which is somewhat similar in scope.

Michal Ostrowski, a developer with the K42 project at IBM Research, posted to dragonfly.kernel and noted that DragonFly and K42 are very similar in design and could benefit from interaction. He brought up several papers located on their site: a K42 overview, K42 and traditional UNIX APIs, and K42’s threading and scheduling infrastructure. The closely-related Tornado operating system also has some good information.

I’ve been playing too much Day of Defeat; I see ‘KAR98‘ every time I read K42. The project’s not about a teutonic WW2 rifle, though – the name K42 has a different origin.

Jeroen Ruigrok pointed out this Newsforge article that says SCO will probably be bringing the AT&T settlement over BSD into court. According to people’s opinions, however, this is a last legal flailing, rather than anything that will significantly affect BSD-derived systems like DragonFly.

Daemonnews also has a mention of this, where Marc Rassbach points out the article’s author has a ‘poison pen’ history vs. BSD products, and Peter Hansteen notes a Forbes article on SCO, this Byte article, and the ever-bearded Greg Lehey’s excellent appraisal of this mess.

According to Matt Dillon, DragonFly will skip the multiple branch style of FreeBSD (STABLE, CURRENT branches) and tag the single main branch, slipping as needed for security fixes.

Jeroen Ruigrok suggested the Sun Grid Engine (FreeBSD version) as a project for anyone with time on their hands.