Blogging All About BSDs

Ah, August.  The month where everybody goes on vacation.  I’ve been gone off and on for the last few weeks, so my link collection has been slower, but I’ve been able to keep up something.

• Friday was whyday.  (via)  I can certainly agree with the sentiment.
• Panic panic panic panic panic panic panic
• Not BSD or even

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Assertions, in DragonFly, are places in the code where the programmer lists a condition, and tells the system to panic if the condition doesn’t exist.  It’s a good way to guard against weird situations, when something ends up with a strange value.  Do you actually use them while programming?  Then Adam Hoka’s patch to print file name and line number

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It sounds like I’m about to mention something pirate-themed, doesn’t it?  Brendan Kosowski needs the rum(4) driver, for (I think) Ralink RT2501USB and RT2601USB wireless.  He’s willing to offer a bounty of $100 to anyone who can get it working before the next DragonFly release.  Work on it if you can port, or add money if you can use it.

Francois Tigeot took an old Summer of Code proposal, VFS Quotas, and started running with it.  He’s made some progress, as he detailed in a recent post to kernel@ (with code!) , but the nullfs-mount nature of PFSs in Hammer are making it difficult.

Sepherosa Ziehau continues his relentless network feature improvement/porting: this time, adding the ability for DragonFly to recognize more varieties of Broadcom hardware.

Apparently, if you are running IPv6, and using radvd (Linux)/rtadvd (BSD) to autoconfigure your hosts with IPv6 addresses, you need to tell your DragonFly hosts to accept this.

If you’re running 64-bit DragonFly, and you’re on version 2.11, you will want to rebuild with the latest sources.  Peter Avalos found a bug with file descriptor passing, and Venkatesh Srinivas fixed it.  It will require a quickworld/kernel build – maybe a full buildworld and kernel?  I’m not sure.   Some pkgsrc packages might need recompilation, too if they also

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Sepherosa Ziehau has been making a lot more changes to the msk(4) driver for Marvell Ethernet chipsets.  I link to this commit adding support for Yukon Supreme cards, but there’s a great deal of work from him, recently added.

Sascha Wildner has committed version 3.981 of the mfi(4) driver, for a variety of LSI MegaRAID SAS 92XX devices.  Read the commit message for details on the model numbers.

Thanks to Antonio Huete Jimenez, there’s now an explanation in the vkernel(7) man page on how to netboot virtualized DragonFly kernels.

This is a shorter version of a Lazy Reading post, but it’s linking to some extensive writing.  Yay for having other people make up for my brevity!

• Here’s part two of the excellently written story of @.  Again, interesting because it mentions ASCII, and its unlamented predecessor BCDIC, among other things.  Read part 1 if you missed it.
• Stephen

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Well, if you tell it to do so.  Matthew Dillon has added a user-settable limit to the amount of memory used during deduplication, so if your Hammer-using system is low on RAM, you can conserve.  This is probably most useful if you are running DragonFly in an extremely small VM, or if your name is Venkatesh.

(inside joke; Venkatesh

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Sepherosa Ziehau has added support for a wider range of Marvell network interfaces; specifically the chips on board, not just card models.  If you’ve got the right chips but they aren’t working for you, you know what to do.

Samuel Greear posted a progress report on his kqueue Summer of Code project.  There’s code available now to try it out.  It sounds grand, though I can’t identify what effects it will have for the end user.

CVS has traditionally been used to distribute the files in pkgsrc, but there’s been a converted git version for DragonFly for a bit now.  It looks like there is now an official version (i.e. for everyone, maybe to replace CVS?) at Github.

Sepherosa Ziehau has, over the last few months, effectively completed the “Update ACPI and interrupt routing” code bounty on the DragonFly code bounties page.  Yay!  I’m on the hook for the $50 I pledged towards that…  (it’s already off the page; here’s the change if you want to see it.)

I’m a bit slow in reporting this, but: BSD Magazine for August is out in free PDF form.  The theme article is memory file systems, but there’s all sorts of stuff, including an article from me talking about how I set up bulk builds of pkgsrc.

The August issue of the Open Source Business Resource magazine is out, talking about starting open-source based businesses.  It also announces a name change, to “Technology Innovation Management Review”. The reason, according to the editor, is that the original purpose of the magazine was to explain how you could make money creating or using open source software.  People

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We went from feast to famine, and now back to feast.  grok.v12.su is back up and running, for your source comparison needs.  It complements the one at pkgbox64.dragonflybsd.org – plus it still contains source for multiple operating systems.

Note/update: grok.v12.su is having some problems keeping Tomcat running, so your mileage may vary…

EuroBSDcon 2011, which is happening in Maarssen, The Netherlands 2011/10/6 to 2011/10/9, is now open for registration.  This is the 10th anniversary!