MidnightBSD Developer Journal

The GENERIC kernel configuration is now SMP enabled.  With new processors shipping with at least two cores, it makes sense to look forward with MidnightBSD.  By the time we ship 1.0, these new systems should be commonplace.  This change is only in CURRENT and will not be done in STABLE. 

I just purchased a Widescreen display for my PC.  It was a low cost (read cheap) display from westinghouse.  I couldn't get X11 to display anything except at 1280x1024 which isn't even supported by the display!  Very strange.  After a little googling, I learned about the ModeLine property for monitors in X11.  I've written a blog entry on the setting changes here.

http://it.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/05/31/1629259

This could effect MidnightBSD distribution in Germany. 

ctriv has created a new i386 snapshot. Look for 0.1-20070525-SNAP which includes the latest security update.

Security Update

The recent file magic issue discovered in FreeBSD has been patched in MidnightBSD. Current and Stable have been updated. cvsup to get the latest updates.

Documentation Update

ctriv updated the documentation on mports.  Please review the new policy document if you are developing ports. 

Installation Instructions

Our current snapshots are out of date.  It is recommended that you download the most recent update and do the following:

1. Install the most recent snapshot for your architecture
2. Use anonymous cvs or cvsup to update the src and mports collections.  See the MidnightBSD website for more on this.
3. Update MidnightBSD using the checked out source by building the new code.  (buildworld + buildkernel + installkernel + reboot + installworld + mergemaster)  Note that mergemaster -p is probably not needed unless you get an error about audit
4. Build and install mports using the new version. 
   
5. Report any bugs to http://bugreport.midnightbsd.org

I've been quite busy with real life lately.  ctriv and wintellect have been working on the MidnightBSD mports system.  Our ports tree changes have been coming along nicely.  Many ports are working on i386 and amd64. 

Tonight I've been adding some benchmarking applications.  Here's a run from bonnie

defiant# bonnie
File './Bonnie.7486', size: 104857600
Writing with putc()...done
Rewriting...done
Writing intelligently...done
Reading with getc()...done
Reading intelligently...done
Seeker 1...Seeker 2...Seeker 3...start 'em...done...done...done...
              -------Sequential Output-------- ---Sequential Input-- --Random--
              -Per Char- --Block--- -Rewrite-- -Per Char- --Block--- --Seeks---
Machine    MB K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU K/sec %CPU  /sec %CPU
          100 38765 33.0 26854  8.0 32064  7.0 111012 99.9 1663688 100.0 62714.6 176.0

This isn't a real "benchmark" since I didn't follow proper testing procedures, but its still interesting.  I'm running UFS2 on a Western Digital SATA I 80GB 7200 RPM disk, Pentium D 805 2.5 GB RAM, and an intel ICH8 chipset. 

WIth the mozilla port, chatzilla, composer and mail work but not ldap.

We've got Seamonkey building natively on MBSD now.  We have only tested the browser and this is not 100% yet, but its a good start.  The port was committed.  We did notice some problems with the install process.  It was tested on amd64 so far. 

If you subscribe to mbsd's rss feed, this might be more friendly.

http://feeds.feedburner.com/Mbsd

While we're still working on it, I am now able to make install the mozilla browser.  We still need to get mail, chatzilla and other things working with it.

seamonkey or firefox would be nice as mozilla is a bit old.  I do hope we'll get there eventually.  Mozilla still runs faster than the linux browser on my system.

Special thanks to archite and ctriv for helping with this port.

The linux versions of these ports should be properly installing their linux-portname script to start them.  Previously, the path was wrong and set to a fake destdir.  I fixed this last night.  The port versions were not bumped though.  If you installed any of these ports before the mports changes, you don't need to do anything.

I'm committing a few improvements to src/sys/dev/firewire today.  Most of these changes were done in the FreeBSD project by Hidetoshi Shimokawa. 

I committed a fix for the architecture issue with the mozilla port.  Next step is to try to fix make package and work on some of the other "options" like mail, calendar, etc.

The other BSD projects seem to be actively working on SMP.  This could promote more code reuse between the BSDs. 

OpenBSD has added some nice UltraSparc III support.

Lastly, if you've been reluctant to check out ports since our big todo, this might finally be a good time to do it.  Quite a few ports do work now.  We've also started updating ports again with security updates and things. 

I'm debating what to do with the installer.  For the first release, we planned on using sysinstall and then writing a new installer.  sysinstall does not scale well in terms of adding distribution sets.  It uses a bit for each one limiting the total to 32.  Since we have a lot of packages to install for a desktop system this isn't very helpful.  The easy hack is out. 

I was going to write about my progress with pidgin tonight.  Its now included in ports (2.0 beta 7) with 2.0 release almost working. 

I could write about how ctriv has fixed many of the ports in devel and several other categories lately.

That's not the big news though.  One of our largest hurdles has been getting a native web browser on MidnightBSD.  When I say native, I mean really native.  Opera was working before our mports fake changes, but that's technically a FreeBSD binary and it won't be "native" forever.  Tonight, I managed to get mozilla 1.7 semi working on my box.  Currently only the browser component (Navigator) is compiling with debug flags.  The fake and install targets aren't up to snuff yet so you can't install it just yet, but its possible to run it.  In fact, I'm writing this post from native mozilla!  Even after I get this working much better, we'll have to figure out how to unbrand it since we can't distribute official builds of their browsers. 

Archite did most of the work on mozilla.  He should get most of the credit. 

I don't know if we will make the June date for release or not now.  It might be possible to do it. 

I'm making changes to the CVSup server tonight. If you are using CVSup to fetch mports, note the example supfile was changed. The change was checked into current and stable.

For those of you mirroring MidnightBSD CVSup, we now support prefixes as the other BSD projects do. I'm still testing and playing around with a few things.

If you wish to setup a cvsup mirror site, these directions may now be useful. http://motoyuki.bsdclub.org/BSD/cvsup.html

I've also enabled some connection limiting since our main server can only handle so much.

This is one of those projects I've been putting off way to long .

I don't recall if I announced this, but I added our website to cvs a few weeks ago. The module is "www".

I've just added several translated documents to the midnightbsd.org website. Special thanks to Klu for translating them.

I should introduce myself. I'm ctriv; one of the newer comitters here on the project. I've been working on changes to our mports system.

As mentioned earlier, ports now "fake" install into a temporary directory and a package is made from that temporary directory. This package is then installed with pkg_add. This makes the logic of the ports system much simpler. Everything builds a package. Ports only need to know how to build the package. Much of the work that pkg_add does, such as maintaining the package database and running install scripts, is not duplicated in ports.

Unfortunately, such a large change in the system means that many ports no longer function correctly, but in the last week a great deal of progress has been made. The GNUstep core ports have all been updated. GNUstep-make 2.0 has helped a great deal - almost every GNUstep port now works correctly.

GTK and KDE have been updated, as have all the editors except vim5. Changes to bsd.mport.mk have really improved the state of things. The failure rate of ports continues to drop as the system matures.

I'm continuing to go thru the ports tree, my hope is to have all the ports updated by the start of summer.

This blog will now be updated by two people.  I (laffer1) and ctriv will both post updates.  ctriv knows more about the status of mports as he's actively working on it. 

New ports today:
devel/patch
editors/2bsd-vi
editors/impress
archivers/p5-Archivers-Zip
sysutils/p5-File-Which

ctriv has been commiting fixes for many existing ports all week. 

CURRENT and STABLE both have the patch for ipv6 type 0 routing headers.  The problem is that ipv6 routing headers could be run over the same link multiple times.  We've been debating how to best handle this problem over the last few days.  It was a known issue with the RFC, however, OpenBSD recently brought it to everyones attention.  Their solution was just to add an ifdef 0 in the code which seemed rather poor.  There are research cases where this could be useful.  If your system is not acting as an ipv6 router, it is not needed anyway.  While most MidnightBSD systems are intended for desktop use, home users often use *NIX systems for personal routers, etc. 

We chose to use the FreeBSD approach of adding a new sysctl to enable the old behavior. 

For more information, consult the OpenBSD website or the FreeBSD security advisory FreeBSD-SA-07:03.ipv6. 

I urge everyone to flood the gnu config project with config.sub and config.guess patches for MidnightBSD. One was submitted last year and magically new rules were made to keep us out. bje doesn't like BSDs.

http://savannah.gnu.org/projects/config/

Here's an article on debugging the FreeBSD kernel which also applies to MidnightBSD.