February 2010
47 posts
LTP for you and me →
Vincent Stemen has a compiled version of the Linux Test Project available to download and run for anyone interested in helping linuxulator progress. Note that this is not a coding exercise, but…
pkgsrc-2009Q4 release announcement →
It’s been available to build for some time, but the official announcement for pkgsrc-2009Q4 is out. It’s worth reading to see what new packages pushed it over the 9,000 mark.
January 2010
38 posts
New HAMMER presentation →
Michael Neumann presented a talk on HAMMER at the Karlsruher Institut
für Technologie on January 27th. His slides (in English) are now available in PDF or ODP formats, and are listed on the…
New BUF/BIO/VM API finished →
Matthew Dillon’s finished his work on a new API; he’s also posted a short wrapup. This fixes some issues found by fsx for UFS and Hammer, especially in low-memory situations.
Packages for 2.5/i386 available →
A fresh set of pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages for DragonFly 2.5.x/i386 are ready, and already available on avalon.dragonflybsd.org. pkg_radd will fetch them.
Google Summer of Code 2010: it’s on →
Google Summer of Code for 2010 is accepting applications from mentor organizations starting March 8th. Pending acceptance by Google, DragonFly will participate.
If you’ve got ideas, or if you…
Jan Lentfer trawls through contrib →
Jan Lentfer has an update for sendmail, an update for file, and also an update for groff. Apparently he really can whip it out.
(Man, it’s hard to track down the web page for…
Things that are done →
There’s a number of things that all came together in the last 24 hours or so, which means: bullet points!
Jen Lentfer took my suggestion and ran with it. He’s got an update to Sendmail 8.14.4 on…
pkgsrc-2009Q4 binaries almost ready →
A build of pkgsrc-2009Q4 for DragonFly 2.4/i386 is complete, and uploading now to avalon.dragonflybsd.org. When the upload’s done, I’ll change the symlink so that pkg_radd downloads from the new…
Watch out on the bleeding edge with UFS →
If you’re running DragonFly 2.5 and updated in the past week or so, and have UFS disks, there’s some instability introduced by Matthew Dillon’s recent work. It ought to be better by next week.
…
A project: security checks for pkgsrc →
It’s been possible for some time to automatically check for vulnerabilities in installed pkgsrc packages. However, it requires some initial setup work. NetBSD now will check automatically if…
BIND updated to 9.5.2-P2 →
BIND has been updated by Jan Lentfer, fixing two recent vulnerabilities. His note about the update has a link to vulnerability info, for the curious. Along the same lines, Jeremy C. Reed is …
Recent development improvements →
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.
More pkgsrc chopping →
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…
Jobs jobs jobs →
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…
DNSSEC now supported →
Jan Lentfer’s committed support for DNSSEC. It’s supported by default, meaning you can use it right now on a 2.5.1+ system. He’s tested it locally using these instructions, which I link to…
High-performance SSH patch added →
Peter Avalos has added the HPN patch for OpenSSH; the commit message notes changes and links to a page with far more detail and acronyms than I can easily fit in a post.
pkgsrc: it’s over 9,000! →
I started building the pkgsrc-2009Q4 packages on several machines tonight, and I noticed something. The previous quarterly release, pkgsrc-2009Q3, had 8,969 packages. This release has 9,100. That’s…
pkgsrc-2009Q4 branched →
There isn’t an official release announcement as of this moment, but the next quarterly release of pkgsrc is out. This is 2009Q4, meaning development happened in the 4th quarter of 2009. I’ll start…
Messylaneous for 2010/01/15 →
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…
Hello, government! →
I noticed some slowness when reaching this server, this morning. Logging in, there was no heavy CPU or swap usage. Looking at netstat, I saw the reason: the Department of Homeland Security was…
The pkgsrc chop →
Joerg Sonnenberger is planning to remove a number of outdated or broken packages from pkgsrc, after the next quarterly release. Speak up if you’re actively using one of those packages slated for…
More REDO →
That didn’t take long: Matthew Dillon has an update on his REDO work; he’s about halfway there. His summary includes instructions on how to test this new work, including ways to change how Hammer…
Huge cleanup for games →
Recently, Sascha Wildner committed a huge number of changes to the various games, bringing them in line with what’s on NetBSD and style(9). This was all put together by Ulrich Spoerlein.
I draw…
Interest in tmpfs, again →
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.
Hammer REDO and other storage notes →
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.
OpenSSL and also DNSSEC →
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…
BSDTalk 184: Matthew Dillon and DragonFly →
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…
Fix for common libc problem →
There’s a recent libc vulnerability that appears to be present in every BSD and Linux flavor. (Nearly every? There’s a lot…) Antonio Huete Jimenez committed the fix, with instructions on how to
Hammer downgrade and upgrade bug →
Thomas Nikolajsen experienced firsthand a bug where downgrading a Hammer PFS master to a slave and then later making it a master again lost all data. Lucky him… The problem’s now fixed.
Too much ram: it’s possible →
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…
vr(4) driver fixup →
Jan Lentfer noticed a lot of errors with his vr(4) card under load. Matthew Dillon suggested some reasons/fixes, and then made a commit that may fix it. Please test if you have an older…
dragonflybsd.org fixed →
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.
MPSAFE details →
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…
Bleeding edge made less sharp →
As previously noted, some of Matthew Dillon’s work was potentially destabilizing. The “danger period” (I saw no issues reported) is over.
cryptodev support added →
Jan Lentfer has added cryptodev support in openssl. What does that mean? It means that separate encryption hardware can be used to offload the computation needed to encrypt data for OpenSSL….
Update for spamassassin →
This has been bouncing around other news outlets, but I’ll mention it here: There’s an out of data SpamAssassin rule that can potentially mark mail as spam because of the 2010 date. A mail to…
OSBR: Success factors →
The January issue of the Open Source Business Resource is out, with the topic being “success factors”. Many of the articles focus on participation, and it’s an interesting read. February’s theme…
