Blogging All About BSDs

Two committers who went dormant some time ago:  Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett.  Two committers who recently became active again?  Nuno Antunes and Robert Garrett.  Welcome, back, guys.  Developers tend to be active in open source only for as long as they’ve got an itch to scratch, so it’s always great to see a return.

A bump in shared library version for libssl/libcrypto means that any programs dependent on it will require a rebuild – including any pkgsrc programs.

This only affects you if you are running 2.7, for now.  It means that on upgrading from 2.6 to 2.8, any libssl-using programs will need to be updated.  This may not be a big thing, since pkgsrc-2010Q3 will also be out and people will want to upgrade anyway.

A small crop for Lazy Reading this week – oh well.

• Bad things about SVN.  I’ve always thought git is more interesting, but subversion is easier.   Oh well.  The article is also fun for the unfiltered Windows-hate.
• At least this hasn’t happened yet with pkgsrc.
• What happens if you put your hand in the way of the Large Hadron Collider beam?  (via)

I’ve noticed that if you have older pkgsrc packages installed, and install binary packages for pkgsrc-2010Q2, those packages will refuse to install if pkg_install is an older version than what they were built with.

I ended up force-deleting pkg_install and bmake, and reinstalling by running pkgtools/bootstrap/bootstrap.  There may be better solutions; I’m mentioning it now since it’s a known problem.

Update: “bmake replace USE_DESTDIR=yes” was suggested by Joerg Sonnenberger.  “pkg_add -u /path/to/newer/pkg_install” should also work (untested).

This will probably apply to the upcoming pkgsrc-2010Q3, too.  Building from source is a workaround for now.

Jan Lentfer updated his version of squid, and had issues; this is a note for anyone else running squid to maybe wait before upgrading.  Note that this applies to the development version of squid, not necessarily the pkgsrc version.

Update: No, wait, it’s OK.

A hard disk in crater.dragonflybsd.org, where the repo for DragonFly source is located, died last night.  The disk has been replaced, and the files should all be back in place later today.  Double-check if you committed something in the last 24 hours and make sure it’s there, just to be safe.

If you were looking for something to do, Samuel J. Greear has invested some time in cleaning up the various project idea pages out there, and has links to prove it.

Did you know Fred is the name for the DragonFly mascot?  Well, you do now.  He’s also back in the bootloader, thanks to Joe Talbott.

I mentioned previously that Postgres 9 is already in pkgsrc, but the flip side of that is both Postgres 8.2, and MySQL 4 are being removed.  If you still have these installed, be ready to migrate at your next upgrade.

Oh, and you can switch to clang for building pkgsrc, too.

It looks like 2.8 will be showing up in a few weeks – mid-October.  If things go well, we’ll have prebuilt pkgsrc-2010Q3 binaries to go with it.

Venkatesh Srinivas (whee!) has written up a lengthy post about his idlezero work.  It provides a nice peek into recent work, and how parts of DragonFly work.  I’d normally save it for a Lazy Reading entry, but I don’t want to wait that long.  It should hopefully show up on the dragonflybsd.org site too.

Starting September 23rd, pkgsrc will freeze (i.e. bugfixes only) in preparation for the 2010Q3 release, which is planned for one week later, instead of the usual 2 weeks.  This release will include some very new software like Postgres 9, too.

Samuel J. Greear asks that question, and there’s ongoing discussion of that idea – follow the threads.

BSDTalk has another new episode, (197… almost at the 2-century mark!), and it has 37 minutes of conversation with M. Warner Losh about FreeNAS.

Some time ago, there was an application called pkgmanager, available in pkgsrc-wip.   It worked by tracking ‘wanted’ packages in pkgsrc, and upgrading based on that list.  It hasn’t been updated in some time, however, and may not even build.

‘Rumko’ has written a replacement, called rpkgmanager.   The Gitorious page linked in the previous sentence includes the URL to download the code via Git, so it’s available to try now even though it’s not yet in pkgsrc.

The BSD Show! (am I supposed to include that ! every time?  I’m not sure.) has a 10-minute interview with Caryn Holt of MidnightBSD.  Also, the B-side of the interview is up.

In an effort to support a new system with an AMD 880G chipset, Matthew Dillon has updated the AHCI driver.  If you have SATA drives using AHCI, please test.  (with any chipset, not just 880G.)

I haven’t covered this enough: thanks to Alex Hornung, it’s possible to create a HAMMER volume and have it be encrypted.  Matthias Schmidt has done just this, and has provided an rconfig(8) script to automate the process.  (Or to crib from if you prefer to do it by hand.)

Sascha Wildner has brought in some changes to twa(4), for various 3ware RAID controllers, from FreeBSD.  Also, YONETANI Tomokazu has added PCI IDs fixed up files for Adaptec ServeRAID 7x ips (4) devices.

Two recent changes in the way virtual kernels are constructed should make a speed difference.  The startup time is reduced (and more memory can be given to the vkernel), and the overall running speed should be quicker, too.