Posts in category DragonFlyBSD Digest
An early DPorts education
John Marino’s DPorts project, mentioned here briefly before, is interesting. I had two separate people ask me how it works, so a better explanation is in order. I’ve tried it out on a test machine over the past few weeks.
Background:
Dports is an effort to use FreeBSD’s ports system as a base for DragonFly, and the pkg too [...]
pkgsrc-2012Q4 out
It’s actually been out since the start of January, but the release announcement is available now.
Can you read French? Then read this.
Stéphane Russell, on the users@ mailing list, pointed out an in-depth article about DragonFly’s 3.2 release, on linuxfr.org. It’s in French, which means I’m just going to have to trust his word about the contents.
BSD Magazine: panoramic photography
January’s issue of BSD Magazine has something I didn’t expect: an article on panoramic photography on BSD – among other material.
Virtio and virtio-block drivers added
Venkatesh Srinivas and Tim Bisson have been working for some time on a port of FreeBSD’s virtio and virtio-block drivers. (see man page commit) They’ve now been committed. This should make your virtual disk perform better, if nothing else.
More on the Himeno Phoronix benchmark...
If you recall, Phoronix recently ran a bunch of benchmarks on DragonFly. One spot that didn’t look good was the “Himeno Poisson Pressure Solver”. I’m no closer to knowing what capability it actually tests other than itself, but Alex Hornung, Matt Dillon, and Venkatesh Srinivas figured out that cache coloring was the [...]
Lazy Reading for 2013/01/06
I’m going for the terse list of links. It’s sort of Neukirchen-ish.
Top 10 Command Line Utilities 2012. a bit silly given the program age but that’s OK. (via)
The Vim Beginner’s Site. (also via)
An Amiga emulator in Javascript. (via)
In the same vein, World of Commodore videos. (via (Read more...)
BSDCan 2013 proposals
BSDCan 2013 is looking for papers, all due by the 19th. I mentioned it before, but a reminder went out and Michael W. Lucas wrote up a lengthy explanation of how and why you should present that paper.
DPorts and what it’s about
John Marino has been working for some time on a project he calls, ‘DPorts’. You may have noticed his recent commits for it. He wrote up a summary on users@ to explain what he’s doing. It’s translating FreeBSD ports to DragonFly in a way that appears to be (relatively) low-maintenance. It only works on DragonFly 3. [...]
Project ideas again
Ishan Thilina asked for some project ideas, and Samuel Greear gave a list of links that may be useful for anyone looking for a project of their own. I offered strategy. It didn’t work out, but this information’s still useful.
BSDDay 2013 in Europe
Are you anywhere near Italy? BSD-Day is happening April 6th, 2013, in Naples, Italy, and it would be nice to have some DragonFly representation. (seen on #dragonflybsd on EFNet.)
EuroBSDCon 2012 videos are out
As seen on OpenBSD Journal, the videos for EuroBSDCon 2012 are online. There’s a lot of sessions there, so set aside some time.
AVX support added to DragonFly
Adam Sakareassen submitted a patch for AVX support for 64-bit DragonFly, and Alex Hornung has committed it. If you’re like me and have only the vaguest idea what AVX is, it’s a set of processor instructions added by Intel to Sandy Bridge and later CPUs.
pkgsrccon 2013: March 23rd, Berlin
Will you be near Berlin, Germany, in March? The pkgsrccon 2013 technical conference will be held there. Julian Djamil Fagir posted details about the event. The conference is free; you pay for your food and drink. If you’re interested in presenting, you need to contact them before March 8th.
Maintaining a wiki for fun
The Open Graphics Project, which is building a completely open video card, needs a wiki maintainer. It’s a volunteer effort. If you were perhaps thinking you wanted to step up to a more complex project but didn’t want to just be writing code, here is a perfect opportunity.
(Not too different from maintaining a project work blog, [...]
BSDTalk 221: Matthieu Herrb and Xenoc...
Right in time for the end of the year, BSDTalk 221 is out, with Michael Dexter interviewing Matthieu Herrb at EuroBSDCon 2012 for 11 minutes about Xenocara.
Lazy reading for 2012/12/30
The last of the year.
Outgrow.me, a list of successfully funded Kickstarter and IndieGoGo projects. There’s some neat technology doodads in there. And a zillion hipster iPhone tripods.
Remember when you could find program source code printed in magazines, for you to type in? Here’s an interesting story about that. (via)
Some [...]
Brief conversation about disk encrypt...
There’s a short thread running on the DragonFly users@ list about disk encryption; there’s some descriptions of encryption work there for the curious.
Upcoming pkgsrc removals for 2012Q4
As is customary with pkgsrc, a number of packages that do not build or are no longer needed will be removed. This will happen in the next quarterly release. It’s a short list, and one item on that list, misc/p5-Locale-Maketext, will actually stay.
The freeze for pkgsrc-2012Q4 is due to complete in about 48 hours.
IFQ packet staging mechanism added
I’m not sure what IFQ stands for, but Sepherosa Ziehau’s added it. It appears to be based on an idea from Luigi Rizzo called ‘netmap‘. In this case, network packets are grouped together before being placed onto the network interface’s hardware queue. That means better packet per second performance without a co [...]
