Blogging All About BSDs

John Marino has made it possible to use ‘gold‘, the new linker in binutils 2.21, on DragonFly.  His explanatory post outlines the benefits (much faster C++ compiling), and caveats (does not work yet for building world/kernel).

Samuel Greear has a totally untested update to the NVIDIA video driver available.  It may not work, but it’s not like that’ll be any different than the current state of the driver.

I have them, for DragonFly 2.11/i386 and DragonFly 2.11/x86_64 (see pkgsrc-bulk), on pkgsrc-2011Q1.  I think I even uploaded them correctly this time.

Ferruccio Zamuner will be doing a talk about DragonFly at the Italian Perl Workshop in Turin, in September.  It’s a free event.  He’s working on slides, and is looking for feedback on them (I assume once he has them.)

Adam Hoka, a student in Google Summer of Code for DragonFly, has created a wiki page for his device mapper mirroring project.  Not a lot there, but I’m happy to see the reference.

This week: lots more reading!

• Michael Lucas describes an extra layer of protection for when you can’t force public key usage on every SSH user.
• Cool, but obscure Unix tools (via)  The screenshots are all from a Mac… How many of the 24 tools listed are in pkgsrc/pkgsrc-wip?   Almost all of them.  (tpp sounds entertaining.)
• NYCBUG, in

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If you’ve used ‘free’ on Linux to find available memory, Steve O’Hara-Smith has described the way to do the same thing on DragonFly.

It looks like Sepherosa Ziehau is working on getting multiprocessor kernels able to boot on single-processor systems.  This makes life a bit easier, since there’s only one kernel needed for any given processor.  I don’t know if it’s in a finished state yet.

Matthew Dillon did some tests building both with an Intel i7 2600K and AMD PhenomIIx6 1090T CPU, and posted the results.  He follows up with a note that the lower electricity cost of the Intel i7 makes it price-comparable with the AMD chip within a year and a half.

For anyone who missed/couldn’t join Summer of Code, there’s still lists of potentially interesting projects, as Alex Hornung points out.

I mentioned it before, but Matthew Dillon’s updated his Hammer document, and posted about it.  Read on, especially if you like extremely complex plans.

Edit: first link fixed, plus there’s a followup.

I finished two builds of pkgsrc-2011Q1 on DragonFly; the reports are available.  The only real breakage is security/heimdal.   There’s a patch for that, though.

Thanks to Matthias Rampke, Chromium builds on DragonFly.  He’s posted with notes and even a screenshot, and has a working i386 binary.

I didn’t think of this, but I needed it: if you have an older Hammer system that now can perform deduplication because you upgraded to DragonFly 2.10, make sure to add it to the configuration for that file system, or else it won’t run.

There’s been some discussion on buying a SSD and how to match it with a hard disk, and/or swapcache.  Follow the thread for more details.