MidnightBSD Developer Journal

MidnightBSD current now includes the netpgp application and library from NetBSD.  The software was based on the openpgpsdk; we have had a port of that for a few months.  However, this is a significantly enhanced version with several bug fixes and active development.  

We will of course track changes as this is an evolving piece of software.  Thanks to Alistair Crooks for this exciting addition to the BSD community.

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MidnightBSD 0.3-CURRENT has undergone some changes lately.  We've removed PCC from the base system.  Details can be found in UPDATING; we decided that the system compiler must support C++ and Objective-C to some degree.   That leaves us two options right now, GCC and LLVM + Clang (eventually)  One possibly factor will be what system implements the new blocks extension to the C and Objective-C languages from Apple, Inc.  We're quite interested in there work with Grand Central and components that aided that development.  (see the snow leopard website and developer area at apple)

There's currently a few gotchas in current including problems building world in regards to the mport / libmport stuff.  We're working on it.  Also, we're toying with including libffi in the base system in order to provide a more complete Objective-C environment. 

We ran a magus run for the first time using the libmport and mport package creation tools under development.  There were about 700 ports that were not built either do to error or non built dependancies.  We consider this quite good for a first time out.  A few bugs have already been fixed with regard to this run and we've also fixed some ports that came up with problems.  During the same time, we ran magus on 0.2 amd64 to help us with a baseline.  Results were quite impressive considering the lack of attention we've had with ports in favor of other projects recently.  

Our plan is to get current back in shape for everyday folks, fix as many ports as possible and then provide a snap with mport packges for people to try out.  This isn't going to happen immediately, but it's our next big milestone before a 0.3 release can happen. 

I also want to point out the mport database format can change and there could be some quirks.  Chris is still actively working on it.  

MidnightBSD current includes ZFS (version 6).  Over the weekend, I got some time to kick the tires.  A usb based disk was setup with a ZFS pool and some informal benchmarking was done.  We also created a new ZFS kernel config file to help people setting up a simple environment.  Tuning is necessary with ZFS, but it's a good head start.

Results were promising overall.  Since a formal methodology was not used, I won't post results.  One thing to note is that magus will not work with ZFS.